Qball's Weblog

New gmpc test machine

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I used to have an old imac for this, but it died.

But I got my hand on some new “old” hardware, namely a macintosh powerbook G3 (lombard).
cpu: 740/750
clock: 400Mhz
Cache: 1mb
memory: 190mb
Hardisk: 8gb
Optical: 24x cdrom – dvd reader
Screen: 14.1 inch 1024×768
Os: linux 2.6 Debian lenny

One thing is pretty fun, I had a asus wl-100g wifi card lying around, so I decided to plug it in.
The bcm43xx driver started to ask for firmware, this wasn’t available in the default drivers found on the homepage. After some googling, I discovered this firmware was available in the apple airport2 driver, so after copying them from my mac, it worked just fine. Didn’t expect an asus card to run apple firmware, even if it had the same chip.
Everything on the laptop seems to be working fine, I still got a good 1 hour 50 minutes on the battery (it turned off after 2 hours, turning it on again said 60% remaining)
Standby works, dimming the display from the powermanager works. A really decent experience.