I am a moderator on the mintppc.org forums. I am flattered that you visited my site, but any questions you have will be answered quicker on that forum. Besides, most of this information is out of date with the current mint ppc 9 and debian squeeze. There are a few notes…

wpa
Squeeze comes with kernel 2.6.32.5 and when adding the orinoco driver (below) and by just adding ‘apt-get install wpasupplicant wireless-tools’ wpa works great with wicd or command line. No need to update the kernel!

power
Squeeze also has fairly functional suspend features. Hibernate is still borked though.The power management of lxde isn’t as configurable as I would like and when compared to gnome. But merely pushing the power button executed a suspend to ram. Somehow closing the lid and suspending was giving me issues as well. But somehow it started working again. It appears that squeeze uses ppbuttonsd, but powerprefs 9the gui front) was not installed and could be installed manually from the lenny packages.

right click
The right click is mapped to the F11, and my fix (below) didn’t seem to move it. I removed mouseemu with a ‘apt-get remove mouseemu’ and my fix worked. I tried to configure and use mouseemu, but it wasn’t cooperating with me. I figure it is one less service running, right?

mint
Running the mint ppc 9 install script on top of a basic installation (no gui) adds lxde with enough features for most needs. To install mint jump over to mintppc.org and register and click on the installation link and choose mint9. Pay special attention to the part where the author says, “We cannot yet install Squeeze natively as there is still a bug in the Debian Installer with respect to yaboot.” There are steps explained to overcome that problem. It can be a bit confusing. But you download the Lenny netinst or business card install CD and when prompted to enter “install”, “install video=ofonly” or “expert” just type “expert. And go through each step. You will eventually be prompted to select ‘lenny’ ‘squeeze’ or ‘sid’. Select squeeze. Continue the installation and when asked what packages you want, un-check desktop but leave laptop.

Out of date information below this point…

To install Mint, you should jump over to http://mac.linux.be/content/mint-lxde-debian-lenny-ppc#4 and read what there is to learn. then come back here and see how I tweaked it to run on the iBook. And get everything else to work as well. After playin with mint for some time, i detemined that lxde wasn’t enough of a window manager for me. So I went back to a gnome desktop. But, I have a 800Mhz cpu with 640MB of RAM so I didn’t need lxde. Some of the lighter iBooks out there will have better performance with lxde.

The tutorial outlined by linuxopjemac assumes that you have a default and basic install of debian with no other X sessions managers (ie. gnome or kde) and was intended to run on a desktop not laptop computer. But to get wpa and suspend, I had to sacrifice the ultra trim debian installation and go ahead and install a gnome desktop and applications. Then configure gnome to work properly. I then added only the required mint packages and themes and left out the other packages suggested by linuxopjemac. This left me with a minty lxde OS, but using mostly gnome applications. This is a situation that I’m quite happy with.

So first grab yourself a lenny (5.04) debian install CD and install it on your iBook, including gnome desktop. When that is done, you can begin configuring.
all of this needs to be done as root. So

su

and enter the root password
As usual, for iBook suspend and wpa you need a 2.6.32 or better kernel. In debian, you don’t have to roll your own.

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

save and back in terminal

apt-get update && apt-get install -y lxde linux-headers-2.6.32-3-powerpc linux-image-2.6.32-3-powerpc
apt-get remove -y pmud powerprefs pbuttonsd
nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and comment out

#deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Back in the terminal

cp /etc/yaboot.conf /etc/yaboot.conf.original
nano /etc/yaboot.conf

remove “video=ofonly”, but leave the quotes.

ybin -v

shutdown now -r

on reboot

uname -r

and verify the new kernel.

su
apt-get autoremove

now we get and apply the orinoco driver for wpa

cd /tmp
wget http://www.ant2ne.com/downloads/iBook_orinoco.fw.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf iBook_orinoco.fw.tar.bz2
mv orinoco.fw /lib/firmware/agere_sta_fw.bin
modprobe airport
shutdown now -r

After all of that, we have a functional 2.6.32 kernel with wpa and we can suspend to ram with the command s2ram. But you need to configure it to unload and reload these drivers on suspend. The method I’m playing with now is on ifup and ifdown events.

su
cd /bin
nano power_suspend.sc

and then copy and paste in the following

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
hibernate)
#echo “Hey guy, we are going to suspend to disk!”
ifdown eth1
modprobe -r airport
modprobe -r orinoco
echo hibernate ————– >> /tmp/power.log
date >> /tmp/power.log
;;
suspend)
#echo “Oh, this time we’re doing a suspend to RAM. Cool!”
ifdown eth1
modprobe -r airport
modprobe -r orinoco
echo suspend ————— >> /tmp/power.log
date >> /tmp/power.log
;;
thaw)
#echo “oh, suspend to disk is over, we are resuming…”
#modprobe orinoco
modprobe airport
ifup eth1
echo thaw ————— >> /tmp/power.log
date >> /tmp/power.log
;;
resume)
#echo “hey, the suspend to RAM seems to be over…”
#modprobe orinoco
modprobe airport
ifup eth1
echo resume ————— >> /tmp/power.log
date >> /tmp/power.log
;;
*) echo “somebody is calling me totally wrong.”
;;
esac

Now we need to link this script in bin to the loction where the power management will look for it. Scripts in the sleep.d directory are executed each time the computer is suspended, resumed, hibernated or thawed. Notice that I never did get hibernate and thaw to work. But with a good battery the suspend and resume is awesome. It is fast and conserves a lot of energy.

chmod +x *.sc
ln -s /bin/power_suspend.sc /etc/pm/sleep.d/22power_suspend.sc

Hard Drive tweaks

hdparm -B 127 /dev/hda
hdparm -M 254 /dev/hda

Right Click The right click is naturally mapped to the F12, wich is dumb. The fn & alt keys are much more conveneint.

nano /etc/sysctl.conf

And edit or add the following

dev.mac_hid.mouse_button_emulation = 1
dev.mac_hid.mouse_button2_keycode = 87
dev.mac_hid.mouse_button3_keycode = 100

exit and save. Then, back in the terminal execute

invoke-rc.d procps start

so the changes take effect.

I now have suspend, wpa and screen dimming on a debian system.

Mint
To install Mint, you should jump over to http://mac.linux.be/content/mint-lxde-debian-lenny-ppc#4 and read what there is to learn. This install script assumes that you are installing on a basic debian install only. And not with gnome or configured settings for suspend and wpa. I noticed that some application in that script breaks suspend. So for a functional suspend, grab the install script called mint-installer. Then trim out the part that will install the other applications. With the current mint-installer script (as of 5/5/2010) you can just…

tail -105 mint-installer > iBook_mint.sc
rm mint-installer
chmod +x iBook_mint.sc
Apt-get install lxde
./ iBook_mint.sc

After playing around some, I determined that lxde and mint didn’t fit my needs so I went back to a default gnome-debian install on my ibook.