iBook Clamshell

Got a new problem : an iBook Clamshell. It works fine, except for the cdrom drive, which I need to install another OS on the hard drive. I wasn't thinking it would be that challenging. It's a 1st generation iBook, with only one USB port (no firewire).

When I discover that the cdrom drive was broken, I just plug my USB DVD drive into it. Pressing [Option] key ([alt] key on a recent Apple keyboard) during booting brings the boot menu where we can choose the boot device. The external drive must be plugged and ready before the computer starts.

In the boot menu, icons change according the OS on it : smiley for Mac OS 1-9, X for Mac OS X, Tux for Linux, something like a happy sun (well it's suppose to be puffy) for OpenBSD and Huxley for Darwin. Mac OS 9 boot but hang when the CD wallpaper is shown. Mac OS X crash during the boot time (it seems that OS X disable the USB port during the boot procedure, which blocks de drive), Tux wasn't able to boot (loop in boot menu), as OpenBSD and NetBSD. The only one that works correctly is Darwin 8.01.

I've tried to boot from OpenFirmware without big success. OpenBSD almost boot. To make it boot, I would need to change config file and create a custom boot device.

USB pendrive doesn't work for me. At least I wasn't able to make the iBook see it as a boot device.

Another solution would be to boot from network. So I config my sawtooth with DHCP, NFS and Bootp services. The bootp keep give me an error and doesn't want to start.

So I've got Darwin working on it, but I need to patch and upgrade many parts to make it useful (8.01 doesn't contains a working X11 desktop, which previous version does. Don't know why.).

For now, I'm patching GCC, which is quite buggy and old in Darwin 8.01 release. It takes a lot of time.

Update : Not enough hd space to patch everything. It's just a tiny 3Gb by default on this generation of iBook. Otherwise, it works great with Darwin in text mode. Code some stuff. But the old and bugged gcc/lib version installed by default with 8.01 is annoying. I still love the design of this computer, not much the color (cyan), but is't a good start to learn internal working of Mach/Darwin. Originally, I was planning to give it to my nephews. It's a pretty study build laptop, good for kids. But since I wasn't able to install a GUI, they won't like it.