Hi,

a few people have problems to install SuSE on the new PowerBooks of iBooks. Here is a short howto to get things going. The instructions do also apply to G4 with nVidia cards.

7.3-ppc should boot and install without problems on the 'older' Titanium PowerBooks and the iBook dual-USB. 7.1-ppc should work as well, but you need a newer kernel.

The just released PowerBooks have the ATI Radeon chip and there was no support at the time of 7.3 creation. So all you have the the generic OpenFirmware framebuffer.

booting the CD on 7.1-ppc should work like that:

reboot and hold down command+option+o+f until a prompt appears. this command will start the installer: boot cdrom:,\yaboot

the bootloader should start, type 'install video=ofonly'

booting the CD on 7.3-ppc should work in any case, hold down the 'c' key during startup. If that does not work, reboot to the OpenFirmware prompt and type that command: boot cdrom:,install video=ofonly

that should start the installer.

Everything is fine when you see the penguin.

You should upgrade the kernel and modutils after installation. The files can be found here: ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/kernel/BETA/k_deflt.rpm ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/kernel/modutils.rpm

Unfortunately, the new PowerBooks have an unsupported internal USB modem. It is like a Winmodem, you need to upload some firmware to get it going, this is only available for MacOS. There is no solution to make it work in Linux.

Ethernet should work, sound should work on the older iBooks and PowerBooks. I have no reports about the newer models, it may not work without changes to the alsa driver.

Gruss Olaf