pre-newbie ibook quicksilver opengl graphics-cards sound

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 9:48 PM +1000 9/15/02, ccos wrote:
>hello all,
>
>thinking seriously about going over to linux from os x.
>the more i learn about unix and programming the more appealing
>this option. i've been perusing the net for a while looking for a good distro
>for a total linux newbie, and yellow dog seems to be the one.
>
>i have these two machines:
>
>ibook ( i think it's a 2 ) 600MHz dual w/ an ATY RageM3p29s graphics card

600 MHz dual iBook?  A slip of the keyboard, surely.  :)

>G4 867 (QS) w/ an NVDA GForce 2 MX card
>
>and these questions in regards to both machines:
>
>sound - how is the support for the native hardware?

Output works on my hardware (G4 "Gigabit Ethernet" and G4 "Digital 
Audio" models), but sometimes has issues.  Usually these are due to 
applications which assume sound samples are always little-endian 
rather than problems with the OS.  I wouldn't know about input, never 
having even tried to use it.

>are there drivers out there for multi channel cards at all?
>for instance, in my g4 i've got a motu pci_324 and 2408MKII.

I did some searching and, as far as I can tell, there is almost no 
driver support for MOTU hardware on Linux.  The only thing I found 
was a few Alsa drivers for older MOTU MIDI interfaces, the kind which 
connect to Centronics parallel ports on PCs and RS422 serial on Macs.

>midi - is there anything like os x integrated midi support?

I wouldn't know.  But this might be a good page to find some 
information on Linux MIDI:

http://linux-sound.org

>are there drivers out there for midi interfaces?
>for instance, i've got an emagic unitor8.

I found this:

http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~sbartels/unitor/

But it doesn't sound promising.  It describes a driver-in-progress 
which probably would not work on a Mac (it mentions requiring UHCI, 
and all Macs use OHCI USB rather than UHCI).  The page was last 
updated a long time ago so it's possible that the driver got finished 
and the page just wasn't updated to reflect that.

>graphics - how well does YD support opengl and hardware acceleration.

Not as well as MacOS X.

>how well does it support my graphics cards.

The Rage M3 (aka Rage Mobility 128) in your iBook should be OK.  In 
YDL 2.3, I think the setup effort required to get 3D going on the 
R128 is pretty minimal (it's been a while since I did it, but I think 
all I had to do was edit XF86Config-4 and enable GLX etc.).

The GeForce2 MX is another story. YDL does not support GL 
acceleration on any NVidia card, and is not likely to do so any time 
soon, because while NVidia provides Linux 3D drivers, they're only 
available compiled for the x86 architecture, and furthermore NVidia 
does not provide hardware specs to the open source community.
-- 
Tim Seufert