yes, i had gentoo running on my PB for about 12 years or so.
Nice experience, in my case essentially for software development / kernel hacking for the ppc architecture.
For a regular desktop user i doubt it will be a rewarding experience.
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Fan speed control , do the fans run every time the CPU spikes or is it more Balanced like on OS X ?
there is a dedicated fan control software, like in unix / osx.
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Web-browsers , Firefox 52 seems to compile, but no Flash ? Is it usable ? Are there any Webkit Browsers ?
you have several browsers to choose from but flash won't work as far as i know.
For 2 reasons : old hardware and useless software.
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Touchpad ? Does it support 2nd button right click , scrolling ?
yes, IIRC that worked without problems. 2nd button click had to be emulated and a keyboard key has to be used too, but it works.
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Bluetooth ? Firewire ? Modem ?
firewire and bluetooth works, modem doest because it is attached to an apple proprietary i2c bus IIRC
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nouveau , 3D acceleration on Nvidia ?
as far as i know about nouveau, yes and with hardware acceleration.
Mine has an ATI chip, i can't really help you here.
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SMtube,minitube ? I've read these don't work so no Youtube ?
The only thing that i know works is to download the video and play it with mplayer. There are several scripts / wrappers around that that will do it automagically once you have provided the url.
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haven't really noticed any difference ... didn't really check ...
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Brightness Keys ? do they work in CLI (non-X)
yes, you will have a daemon running for that ( pbbuttonsd)
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yes, same as above
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yes, same performance as macos i would say. IOW, don't expect too much.
This all is from my experience, last time i had gentoo running was about 3 years ago, haven't touched gentoo / ppc since then so there might have been some improvements. I still use gentoo on a regular basis on arm and x86.
But :
- ppc32 is almost dead - there isn't much active development going on as far as i know, not even bugfixing in some cases. That´s why most distros have killed ppc32 years ago, gentoo is one of the few that still supports it and has some sort of development. That im trying to say is that nowadays if you really want use a more or less up to date linux based system on ppc, debian, gentoo and a few more are your only choices.
- modern graphical desktops requiere some sort of 3d acceleration. I don't know how the state is with nouveau in ppc world but i hope it is better than with radeons. In case you don't have any acceleration, gnome and kde will default to a software rasterizer ... i always used myself fluxbox to have a half useable desktop environment.
- build times : i know you are aware of that already but yeah, a basic install of an updated base gentoo system if you don't use any sort of distributed compiling will take about 2 days ( and thats without even a graphic desktop, just to have the updated base system to boot the machine). I mean, bootstrapping gcc itself can take about 4/5 hours, building a stripped down kernel can take about 2 hours and so on. In case you really want to try gentoo i would really encourage you to have a look to a basic distributed compiling setup. Or maybe just use crossdev to build your stuff on a quicker machine. Crossdev and distcc work quite nice together too.
hope this helps - Andy
