I recently installed Debian on my original Apple iBook (366Mhz). As the rest of the tutorials I could find online are for later revisions of this machine, I thought I would share my experiences with the older original clam shell version.
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Install with new Debian Installer RC2
The first step was to install the base distribution. I choose
the new Debian Installer RC2. I let it repartition my disk and
auto-detect the hardware. This worked very well, finding both
the built-in ethernet card and airport wireless unit. I
downloaded the required packages over the network.
Post Install Hiccup
The wireless card was setup as the default ethernet interface.
I don't have a WAP at home, so after a quick bit of playing, the
wired interface card was configured to be the default.
Getting X-Windows Working
Surprising straight forward. The internal graphics card in the
original iBook is a ATI Rage Mobility 4Mb, apparently connected via
the AGP interface. I had to set the bus interface for X to
PCI:0:16:0. The Rage card is supported as a standard driver,
so no problems. Setup to 800x600x32 (the maximum resolution
supported) worked fine. The trackpad was configured to present
itself on the standard mouse device, so that was easy so. My
external Microsoft USB mouse even works.
Help, my Eyes are Burning...
By default, the screen brightness is set to maximum. This is
too bright for me, so I needed to adjust it. A small amount of
searching lead me to pbbuttond. After an apt-get install,
issuing the following sets the brightness to an acceptable level:
pbbcmd config LCDBRIGHTNESS 10
I need to close and open the lid to allow this, but that's not a big problem.
Battery Life
When I first bought the iBook, and ran it with OS9, I used to get
5-6 hours of life with some aggressive power saving that span-down
the fan whenever possible. I lost this (and a lot of battery
life) in the move to OSX. The fan still runs constantly in
Debian, but my battery life is back to 2 hours 30 mins again (an
improvement over OSX). I only needed to apt-get pmud and
pbbuttonsd to achieve this. Now even sleep works when I close
the lid on my laptop. I can finetune the setup using the
pbbcmd command line, or powerprefs in Gnome. Gnome also
supports a PMU specific battery monitor, so I can see my battery
status at all times.
Contact me if you have any questions, and I will help if I can.
