The regular reader knows that I have right now 3 computers that I use regulary. With two of them there has been some events recently that I can mention here, and for the last one, the P1510, I have promised you some comments on the linux installation.
First, the AMD64 computer that I regularly use at work. The Ubuntu for AMD64 is working flawlessly on that computer. Everything that I need is running just fine. But on friday the NIC fell apart. Usually, that is not a big deal, you just pull the card out and slip a new one in to the box. Problem is that this is a Shuttle SN25p, with the excelent NIC built right into the mainboard. Combined with noe free PCI slot on the mainboard, I do not have any other option but sending the whole box in for service. So, I am happy with the box, it works quite well, and performance is more than adequate for my work (which includes some really heavy simulations of partial differential equations), but no free slot for a emergency NIC can easily be a showstopper in the future. I am thinking on finding other use for the computer within our lab, and get another one for myself.
The PowerMac at home is also doing fine these days. As you know, I ended up installing gentoo on that computer, because the installers of both debian and ubuntu for powerpc failed to work, due to problem with disk partitioning. The installer is just unable to detect the geometry of my partitions, and give me only the option to wipe out the entire disk, including my MacOSX installation, and put in linux. Not what I want, as I use MacOSX for different purposes.
The problem was that I never used the gentoo installed. It just take to much time to compile everything, and a whole lot of packages is masked out for powerpc64, as I guess not very many gentoo users play with these animals. But then I figured out that I already have a working disk geometry and working yaboot for booting the operating system I want, so I just tried to install ubuntu for powerpc64 into or on top of the gentoo installation. For this purpose I chosed the pre-release of the next ubuntu (Dapper Drake), and run the installer in expert modus. In stead of working through the partitioning and mounting step in the installer, I switched to another console, mounted what I wanted as '/target', run the necessary swapon command, and wiped out the original gentoo stuff from /target. Most of the installer worked just fine from that point, except making the installation bootable and writing a correct fstab. The fstab I could easily handle by hand, and the configuration for the 'yaboot' boot-loader I have been clever enough to back up to a USB drive. So, after copying in the yaboot config, running 'ybin -v' and doing some editing of fstab using vim, I have a working ubuntu. Now with most of what I need available in binary form. There are some issues with the airport extreme wireless card, my firewire soundcard and the built in soundcard, but I can live with this.
With the Fujitsu P1510, the history is not very interesting. I booted from Debian sarge net-install cd, performed a regular installation, upgraded to etch. Everything is just fine. Bluetooth, sound, WiFi, Xorg - everything works. There are only a few minior things. Suspend/resume is not working out of the box, so I patched the kernel with software suspend 2. Using this I can hibernate the computer using the swap partition to store the state, and bring it back up and running in a matter of a few seconds. I also have some issues with cpu throttling, I have not manage to get neither cupfreqd nor powernowd to run, this is something I have to look a bit more into.
Take care, folks!
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