I’m just done listing all the PowerBooks and iBooks (G4) models ever released, so it’s time to test.
I expect some of the machines to work out of the box, while some others will require some tweaking.
Please read the ChangeLog and test the current SVN. We’ll have a new release in a week or two, pending completion of the keyboard backlight overhaul and config file support in gpomme.
pommed has seen only little progress in the last weeks, mainly because I am busy with real life right now.
I am trying to find some time to get things done on pommed, which includes adding support for the nvidia-based PowerBooks. If you own such a machine, please drop me a mail. I’ve got a mail from someone with such a machine a couple of weeks ago, unfortunately I lost that mail. If you read this, please resend :-)
The next release should see some improvements in gpomme and some changes in the keyboard backlight behaviour, along with some fixes here and there.
Quick status update on the MacBook Pro support (x86-64) with Linux 2.6.20:
Nothing new on power consumption, WiFi is still unsupported and there is currently no ETA for that. Don’t bother the MadWiFi guys about that, there’s not a lot they can do, if you want to pester/be pissed at someone, try Atheros instead.
I am running through my post-SL TODO list, and I’m down to the item which reads “Write a report”.
We’ve had a very good time meeting users, prospective users and fellow DDs, as always. There were 21 people planned to man the booth, which is an all time record so far, and 18 out of those 21 showed up, which is really quite good :-)
I’m not going to list everybody here, first because the list has grown quite long now, and because all in all it’s the usual French team that has been at it for the past few years already. We had a couple of firsttimers though, including Pierre Habouzit and Yves-Alexis Perez. Everybody did great, thanks for helping out, guys!
Day 0: unpacking sl2007-booth… setting up sl2007-booth…
We had less hardware this year than we had the previous years, for a variety of reasons, so the booth setup actually went quite fast. There were no separations between the booths in the .Org Pavilion this year, so we put a bit of thought into that and figured that, oh well, it’d do anyway.
Pierre arrived at 7:30pm on the booth with some hardware from Sven and 1500 Debian flyers paid for by Linbox. We went for dinner, then Pierre and I spent the night hacking on the Babelbox scripts to get the damn thing to work with the current debian-installer. At 3:30am, we got to the point where the Babelbox would pretty much work, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong at that point.
Day 1: Fixing the Babelbox, frying a graphics card
We ended up fixing the last bit of the Babelbox on the booth in the morning, and preparing the demo system (Pierre’s shuttle) at the same time. It all went fine and we ended up with a dual-head demo system and a beamer-equiped Babelbox in the afternoon after Niv brought a beamer. We used the back of Frédéric’s Debian banner as the screen for the beamer.
We had a nice chat with the Linux+ magazine team in the afternoon, discussing the upcoming Debian release and a dedicated Linux+ issue. We’ll be helping them out tracking the Etch release in the next few weeks until the release.
Back at Pierre’s place, we found out that his shuttle apparently wouldn’t boot. Turns out that only the graphics card died, good news.
Day 2: Business as usual, Debian France meeting
The second day was really business as usual. We saw more people than the previous day, but still there were less visitors than the previous years. The exhibition was smaller than the previous years too, I just hope it’s only a temporary thing and that it’ll be bigger again next year.
This also was the “dinosaurs day”, the day all the old-timers pop by and discuss around the Debian booth. This is becoming a tradition or something :-) As Christian wrote already, we met HP people and talked about Linux support from HP on HP hardware.
In the evening, we had the first formal Debian France meeting. Julien Cristau and Christian Perrier got elected to the board of directors, replacing Cédric Delfosse and Laurent Fousse. The board got reelected, so I’m still the President, Pierre is still the Secretary and Aurélien Gérôme is still the Treasurer. Thanks to Tarsus for lending us a room for the meeting!
Day 3: Packing up
Small day… Quite a few visitors in the afternoon, we talked about Debian France a bit more than we did on the previous day, mainly with other people from the .Org Pavilion.
Conclusion
Overall, a very productive edition this year, we talked about Debian France a lot, about Etch, about quite a few projects involving Debian too. Now we have a lot of work to do to release Etch and develop Debian France to the point were it will actually be really useful for Debian. Hopefully we’ll have things to show in a couple of weeks.
Now that pommed is hosted on Alioth, I’ve created the pommed-devel mailing-list. If you’re interested in pommed’s development, subscribe today ! There’s also a pommed-commits mailing-list for the patch junkies.
Send mail to pommed-devel-subscribe@lists.alioth.debian.org and/or pommed-commits-subscribe@lists.alioth.debian.org to subscribe.
I have made a nice Debian package out of the mactel-linux patches for the appleir and applesmc drivers, so that Debian users can use pommed with a stock Debian kernel.
I’ll maintain the package until the stock Debian kernel includes both drivers.
Grab it here:
http://people.debian.org/~jblache/pkg/mactel-drivers/