[Speakers] Apple PowerBook WAS: Shorts

[Greg Mason]

> OK, I was thinking you had an ibook (with a 4x3 standard aspect).

the iBooks are "stuck" at 4x3 because they can't turn mirroring off. 
They can be unstuck as long as they have an ATI Radeon graphics chip 
with a little firmware hack that will allow monitor spanning. My guess 
is that they limited the iBooks to make the PowerBooks more attractive, 
or maybe just more user-friendly.

> Mine goes to sleeps when I close the lid.  Do I need to modify that
> setting, or does it know enough not to sleep with USB keyboard/mouse?

nope. You can't really change that setting anyways without firmware 
hacks, anyways. You can make it so the machine will stay awake, but the 
PMU will force the machine to sleep eventually (like after 4 minutes).

just be sure to have power attached to the powerbook, as the running it 
with the lid closed doesn't work on battery power, as running the 
powerbook like this apparently consumes more power than driving the 
built-in LCD (or at least that's what Apple says).

> Yes, I've downloaded and installed Apples X11 server, and their dev
> tools (which I've used to compile a C program of mine).
>
> I've also downloaded/installed OpenOffice and NeoOffice/J both.
> (it says you can install them both side by side! :)

last time I installed both, they were two separate things. When I have 
to use OpenOffice, I generally use OpenOffice in X11 anyways.
>
> These don't work under Linux yet:  Airport extreme, builtin modem, and
> the f'n _trackpad_ of all things!  And probably more things that I
> haven't tested yet ...

There's a driver for the trackpad in the latest Darwin sources, if 
that'll help... In fact, that driver will allow non-2005 PowerBooks to 
use the two-finger scrolling method. If you want to try it out, google 
for "iScroll2"

> I've already triple booted it with Ubuntu (two different versions), and
> Mandrake 10.1.  I have two other empty partitions.  I plan on trying
> Yellowdog and a fourth yet-to-be-decided distro.

Gentoo should have the trackpad drivers already, as they seem to be 
pretty up to date on such things.

-Greg