Does Your iBook G3 Keyboard Smell Bad?

One thing that was driving me crazy was I had this smell coming from my dual USB iBook keyboard that would not go away. No matter how much I cleaned it and how many natural and unnatural substances I cleaned it with, it would not come out. Via a link at MAC POWERPC came my answer. MAC POWERPC wrote a piece about The iBook Guy, so I went over to his website and saw this little article titled, "Why does my iBook G3 smell bad?" Putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat and using my amazing skills at deductibility, I followed said link.

Long story short, the odor isn't from any germs or anything. It's from the glue underneath the keyboard apparently decomposing. Other than removing the glue, the only solution is to keep the laptop open when not in use. Or maybe wave it through a cloud of perfume, but that's probably more expensive than the iBook's worth;)

SSD Performance on Various 'Books

Check out these videos showing SSDs in action on iBooks and Powerbooks of yore.

First one is MintPPC Linux booting on an iBook G3 800Mhz:



Next one shows web browsing performance on a clamshell iBook:



Also, boot time comparison between a clamshell 466 MHz SSD vs. a Powerbook 1.67 GHz HDD:



Word:

Sound on a Debian iBook

In Debian, one of the things that didn't work out-of-the-box on the iBook G3 was sound. Forensic research reveals that it's all due to one G5 somewhere in Germany many years ago that went on the fritz when loading the PPC sound module "snd-powermac" during testing (At least this is what I remember from scanning the many forum threads and mailing lists on the subject. But I may have been stoned.). So it wasn't activated by default. This isn't a problem for people with newer PPC machines which use the "snd-aoa" module (Apparently. Again, stoned.), but for people with older Power Macs and 'Books that require the snd-powermac module, you can see how this will cause difficulties.

Luckily it's easy to load the module yourself. First open a terminal emulator and enter:

modprobe snd-powermac

Now test the sound on your Mac. An easy way is to backspace at the terminal prompt--you should hear beeps.

If you hear nothing, then I can't help you. But if you hear sound and you want to keep it functioning on reboot, simply add the line

snd-powermac

to /etc/modules and you're all set.

Also, if you're working from a minimal install, be sure you've installed the packages alsa-base and alsa-utils. Alsa is the sound driver, and it's of some importance to the above.

A Couple of Linux Speed Tweaks

Here are a couple of quick things you can do to speed up your Linux system. First, add "noatime" to your fstab file by typing sudo nano /etc/fstab and in your root directory line (and home directory if you have them separate), under options add the noatime option with a comma like this (from my Debian fstab file):

errors=remount-ro,noatime

And no spaces between the commas. This will greatly reduce the writes to your hard drive as your system will no longer write file access times to disk (not needed for the typical user).

Another quick change is to switch your display's color depth from 24 to 16 (millions of colors to thousands). To my eyes I could never tell the difference on a laptop, so I just opened my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as root and under Section "Screen" I added a tab space followed by DefaultDepth 16 or if you already have a line for it, just change the 24 to 16.

Using glxgears, the frames per second on my Mom's iBook went from 340 to 550 after the change. Not bad for a few seconds work (and a few hours research).