Debian :: Installing On Apple PowerBook G4 - Failed To Connect Properly To My Wireless Card
Aug 7, 2010
Anyway, I've a decent understanding of the various Linux console commands and know how to work my way around a text editor or file system. But I can't seem to fix what's wrong with my computer. I'll list my info here and then discuss the most pressing issues that I need help with.
It's a 17" PowerBook G4, with Airport Extreme (which I understand is a headache all on its own: I'll likely get to that later)
Results of ~$ lspci:
I downloaded the most recent .iso for the PowerPC from [url], specifically the 4.4 GB DVD copy.
During installation, I told it to install only the Desktop Environment and Base System. Installation went through without a hitch, though it failed to connect properly to my Wireless card.
The first issue I encounter after booting is during the login. When logging in as a non-root user, I'm told to change my password immediately (root enforced). I've done this every time I've logged in. Immediately after when I log in I'm told that the system clock is wrong: It's currently set to Jan. 1, 1970. If I try to change it, I get a message saying that I can't, and my desktop won't load properly. If I ignore the system clock issue and try to change it in System > Administration > Time and Date later, after entering my admin password I get a message that says
Failed to run time-admin as user root.
Failed to communicate with gksu-helper.
Received:
Changing password for root.
While expecting:
Apparently the password issue is related to the Time and Date settings (according to Google), but I can't fix those because it wants me to change my password.
Well currently I am having a problem on the installation, when it goes to step 3 "keyboard layout" and I press forward it just stays there loading and does not proceed. It does not freezes or anything but stays there forever and does no proceed to next step. Burned another live-cd thinking it may be the disk itself but still no luck.
I was curious if anyone has dual booted Ubuntu on this model iMac, (Mid 2011 with 4gb ram, 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor, the current model in the apple store).
When I dual booted on my MacBook I came across a plethora of problems, such as the sound not working properly or the wireless card not being supported.
Does anyone know if these same problems exist for the iMac or is everything business as usual?
I have a Good Way Technologies BU2220 CardBus USB 2.0 card which works fine on this same Mac under OS 9.1. It also works fine on a more modern mac with OS X. But I cannot understand why it's not working in Ubuntu 9.10. I had it recognized (I think??) when I had Kubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) installed on this system. I have an old dog - a PowerBook 3400c 240 Mhz 80MB Ram, with a 40 GB HDD. I have Mac OS 9.1 installed on a 5GB partition, and the rest is Ubuntu 9.10, using the LXDE GUI. I switch between Mac OS and Linux using Boot X.
When I slide in my USB card (making sure I have the external power supply attached to it), the system shows a bit of activity, and my display brightness reverts to default. Then there's no more activity. Of course, USB flash drives and USB mice won't work when plugged in. I navigated to /var/log, and looked in the Messages log. There were the following entries:
Feb 11 13:42:09 PowerBook kernel: [ 374.949456] pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket1: pccard: CardBus card inserted into slot 1 Feb 11 13:42:09 PowerBook kernel: [ 374.949881] pci 0000:05:00.0: PME# supported from D0 D1 D2 D3hot Feb 11 13:42:09 PowerBook kernel: [ 374.949916] pci 0000:05:00.0: PME# disabled
I've had a Apple Powerbook G4 for a while now, but being mostly a Windows user I've never used it. I remember when it ran it's native OSX (Which I can't for the life remember) Probably Tiger? Anyways... I tried installing Ubuntu on it about a year and a half ago, the installation was botched and I left it sitting there with no purpose in life. :O
So I've decided to dust the laptop and give it another go. I've progressed a little further with my Linux experience, having installed and tested a few distros and even switching over to Ubuntu 9.10 for about 4 months. Enough of my life story and more to the point.Has anyone installed Ubuntu, or any distro for that matter on the Apple Powerbook G4? I know there are different versions of the G4 and I'm not entirely sure what my version is, It's the 1.6Ghz version with The Nvidia card (Err I think) and extra Wireless card installed. I am not very capable with Mac - After checking Apples website I believe it's the 15inch.
I've read the FAQ thread and will begin trying to install Ubuntu tonight at home, I just wanted some suggestion and some pointers in the right direction. What distro would be most suitable for my hardware? and What is easiest to set up?
I recently installed the XFCE spin of Debian (amd64) on my Lenovo L440. I tried installing it before, but apparently the 3.2 kernel that ships with Wheezy doesn't properly support the proprietary firmware for the wireless card, blah blah. So I wound up using Windows 8.1 for a bit, and then Fedora (boo). Anyway, with the wheezy-backports kernel (3.16.7-ckt4-3~bpo70+1) everything works like a charm. Everything, that is, apart from the sound card — the entire system is completely mute. Well, apart from the system beeper. I searched the forum and found another thread, but that guy was (for some reason) just running dwm — I figured XFCE might feature a more complete sound system. But maybe the output he gave will be useful in my case as well:
During installation at, Select and install software, i had this extra option "Packages to install: rt2x00-source", and answered yes. sources.list has main and contrib sections.
lspci -k Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI Subsystem: Linksys WMP54G ver 4.1 Kernel driver in use: rt61pci ifup wlan0 returns this, SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
I have a Powerbook G4, 550MHz, and I had 10.04 on it, but the wireless wouldn't work. I know that there are tons of variants, but I am sick of wasting disk, time downloading, testing, ect. Has anyone found a really good version of linux that will work? Or am I better off with OS X 10.4?
i installed ubuntu 10.10 on old powerbook g3 (6g hard disk, i think it lombard)m with xfce as desktop (xfce and not xubuntu wich is slower). anyway, everything works fine, but for some reson my vlc just cannot run video file. each time i play him it show a black screen and fall. i tried config his outpot video, and it still dont work, in smoe mode the audio working but the other not.i tried another movie player, and only totem, kaffeine and xine works ok, although very slowly (the video work not smoothly). kaffeine works fine, but not enough. when i had ubuntu 8.04 in the same computer vlc was the movie player i chose and he did his job perfectly.
I am currently trying to connect to internet through my wireless card, after half day's effort I reached to this point:
/******The following error appears in the dmesg kernel ring buffer output: ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw load failed: Reason -2 ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2 ipw2200: failed to register network device ipw2200: probe of 0000:02:03.0 failed with error -5*********/
I found a solution from Intel website saying that the problem might be: "firmware in wrong location or wrong firmware version". So I proceeded to download the firmware and placed it in /lib/firmware. Also I tried to use menuconfig to enable loading firmware via hot-plug, but I think I have done something wrong when I was configuring the hotplug and firmware.
I want to use an old Powerbook i have as a music juke box and am thinking of using ubuntu to run it - assume that i will dual boot with a small partition for osx? and then run an external hard drive with flac encoded music - into laptop then usb dac to hifi Will ubuntu run ok on this machine? I have removed all the stuff on the old hDD - anything else i need to do?
I'd like to try Ubuntu netbook remix 10.04 on my 12" G4 Powerbook, but I can't seem to find it. Does it just not exist? Apple have a range of older 12" models that are no longer supported that Ubuntu would work great on.
I am trying to find out how to get the visual effects working on my PowerBook G4. I have 10.04 installed, and it's running an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 M10. I can't access the xorg.config because it doesn't exist.
I have an Apple Powerbook G4 17" Feb'2005 (1.67GHz PPC G4 CPU, 1Gb RAM, 100Gb hdd) at home. Having the infamous "vertical lines" problem, I need to use use an external 1440x900 DVI monitor (same resolution as braindamaged Apple LCD). I also have some USB-serial hardware (weather station, Arduino, etc) and a Nokia N900 configured as a router (this lets me use a fixed IP on the Powerbook).
I had Ubuntu 9.10 running 24h/24 up to yesterday, so I just updated the yaboot.conf in /dev/hda2 (the boot partition) and booted natty off hard disk and USB pendrive (great thing having an yaboot on a bootable partition). Since Apple separated me from 2900 bucks (ouch!!) six years ago, I don't want to abandon this Powerbook until its very end. But it seems Natty is not a viable option...
I just installed Karmic on a PowerBook G4 Titanium. The install went fine after I figured out that I had to set the date in the open firmware because the PRAM battery is dead. Now when I boot, I get a white screen with black text telling me it's found the display then the splash screen shows up but I never get the login screen, just a blank screen. I can switch to the virtual consoles and fool around, but I haven't gotten it to work yet.
I am trying to install on my Powerbook G4 version 9.04. IT went well and I rebooted it boots up and appears to be loading... In fact says "Loading, please wait"
But the screen begins slowly to fade to white until I can't see anything.
There is one error that might be related I noticed "Radeonfb invalid rom contents".
Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my new-to-me Powerbook 1.67Ghz. PowerPC, as a platform, is most definitely *not* dead. Installation went normal. I installed with network connected to Ethernet rather than Wireless. Installed Wireless firmware. Then I had wireless.
Backlighting didnt work until I added 'i2c-dev' to /etc/modules. Restart, and backlight works, although its a little too sensitive. Hardware acceleration wasn't enabled, so I had to add this to a file called Radeon-kms.conf in /etc/modprobe.d/ "radeon options modeset=0" Reboot. Then I had hardware acceleration and Compiz.
Install/run sensors and sensors-detect. Run as root. Detected HD temp, CPU, GPU temps and fan speed. Make sure this is in /etc/modules: therm_adt746x. Thats the thermal control stuffs. I then installed openjdk and netbeans and eclipse. OpenJDK is slow, but I feel that is due to OpenJDK itself, and not PowerPC.
This gave me a working CPU ondemand throttling: apt-get install cpufrequtils
Installing this gave me a working battery-applet that reported a percentage: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:iaz/battery-status && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install battery-status /usr/lib/battery-status/battery-status --indicator
I get really good battery life, and everything that shipped on this laptop actually works as designed. Forever PowerPC, Forever Ubuntu
I've just installed Ubuntu 9.10 on an old PowerBook G4 I have, and when I go to Power Management, it doesn't provide the tab for battery-related settings (nor do I get the little battery/charge icon in the upper-right panel). I'm comparing this to the version of Ubuntu 9.10 I installed on my EeePC netbook, where those things are present. Is there anything I can do to get the Power Management preferences to recognize that the machine has a battery?
If it helps: the PowerBook had Ubuntu installed on it using the 9.10 "alternate" .iso, as I was having trouble burning the "desktop" .iso to a CD.
I have a Titanium (Onyx) 550 Mhz G4 Powerbook and the standard gnash does not work. I read that you can compile a custom version of gnash for laptops with low spec graphic cards. Could anyone give me guidelines how to do this with gnash? or swfdec? or lightspark?
I'm very new to Debian (and Linux in general), and am currently taking a Linux course at college... I'm trying to get Debian running on my MacBook Pro (late 2009 model) and it's been complicated but I've got the operating system installed on it... I'm just having a few problems, the biggest right now of which is my wireless card, which doesn't work. So, I found instructions on the Debian Wiki for getting the driver for it, but it's not compiled already and I have little knowledge of manually installing stuff through Linux...
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my PowerBook G4 (I think that's powerbook 5,6 but I could be mistaken). Most everything is fine from a function standpoint except for the touchpad/trackpad. Unlike most users who seem to be getting an insensitive touchpad, mine seems to be picking up some interference from an unknown source. The mouse frequently jumps around the screen either horizontally back and forth or sometimes vertically. If I disable the trackpad it seems to stop (at least for a few minutes). Sometimes I can lay my palm flat on the trackpad and it will cause the mouse to stand still also which makes the external mouse usable.
Are there any solutions to this? (I did install the, what is it, gpointing-devices package? The one that provides the GUI for touchpad configuration and that has not helped at all, except that I can use it to periodically disable the trackpad for a temporary fix)
I read through the sticky of wireless card not working, and I followed through with the steps, with the exception of looking for firmware, because I'm certain it has it, being that the card works when I'm running Windows, and overall the system recognizes the device.
The only difference is, I notice that the activity light on the card itself does not turn on when running openSUSE. It recognizes the card, it even detects the network, but when I enter the WEP key and finish, it does nothing afterwards. Still no internet.
A wifi card with the ath5k driver used to work properly until a couple of weeks ago. Now, if I ping the router the response times sometimes are okay but often fluctuate into the range of many hundreds or thousands of milliseconds. Occasionally the connection breaks down entirely.My laptop, which uses a different card, works fine (typical ping response times of 2 ms), so its probably not the router which is faulty.I use opensuse 11.3 x86_64, currently with the 2.6.34.7-0.7 desktop kernel and knetworkmanager
Just installed Fedora 14 from the Live CD i686 on my Dell Inspiron 1521. I can't connect to the SpeedTouch 585 on either wireless broadcom card or the wired Ethernet card.
I can connect to it from the same Laptop on the Vista which is on dual boot on the same laptop.
Further confusing is that I ran Fedora 14 and connected to another SpeedTouch today.
Already checked the Channel on the wireless nic and it's on the same one as the SpeedTouch.
Aluminum Unibody macbook, the only aluminum macbook to date. It has a Broadcom chip in it and I installed the STA drivers. The first day it seemed to work fine. Then I noticed pages stopped loading. The max throughput I get is like 30KiB/s once in a while. Sometimes I see consistent speeds of 600B/S...this really sucks. Is there a fix or anything?
I was going to make the switch slowly to 10.10 full-time, but the wireless issue is bothering me. The keyboard brightness keys don't work natively, but there's a fix I saw but didn't have time to implement earlier. I like ubuntu but I don't like my wireless not working!
I seem to be have issues periodically connecting to wireless networks with WPA. It'll work one minute, and then I switch my macbook back on after a period and it refuses to connect again. It's happened on and off on three different networks now.
An example of /var/log/syslog: Code: Apr 15 17:57:27 macbookpro NetworkManager: <info> Activation (eth1/wireless): association took too long. Apr 15 17:57:27 macbookpro NetworkManager: <info> (eth1): device state change: 5 -> 6 (reason 0) Apr 15 17:57:27 macbookpro NetworkManager: <info> Activation (eth1/wireless): asking for new secrets ..... Apr 15 17:58:27 macbookpro NetworkManager: <info> (eth1): deactivating device (reason: 0). Apr 15 17:58:27 macbookpro NetworkManager: <info> Policy set 'Auto eth0' (eth0) as default for routing and DNS. Apr 15 17:58:29 macbookpro wpa_supplicant[949]: WPA: No SSID info found (msg 1 of 4). Apr 15 17:58:29 macbookpro wpa_supplicant[949]: No network configuration found for the current AP Apr 15 17:58:29 macbookpro wpa_supplicant[949]: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED - Disconnect event - remove keys
I have MacBook 3,1. I just installed 11.04. When I go to activate the "Broadcom STA wireless driver" I get the message "Sorry, installation of this driver failed. Please have a look at the log file for details: /var/log/jockey.log" When I check the log the message is "2011-04-28 18:38:59,896 DEBUG: BroadcomWLHandler enabled(): kmod disabled, bcm43xx: blacklisted, b43: blacklisted, b43legacy: blacklisted"
I have had 10.04 on this computer in the past and it worked fine, but this is a fresh install of 11.04. Any suggestions on where to go from here?
Those are my authentication capabilities, obviously. I am using a WEP encryption for my wireless router and according to this, it will not allow me to connect. Is there anyway to allow that? The wireless card works just fine in Windows, even on the same network encryption type. Using a Intel Wireless/Pro 4965 ag. Note* this is my mother's router and whatnot. She won't change it the encryption type.
