So I’ve been running Gentoo on my shiny new iMac Core Duo the last two days and I already have several issues biting me.

The ATI Radeon X1600 is completely unsupported under Linux right now, which means you need to run your X11 using fbdev and the framebuffer hack the xbox-linux.org guys have come up with. Even the  current proprietary ATI drivers (from the manufacturer itself, for chrissakes!) do not support Radeons with a R500/R600 chipset. This sucks. Hard. fbdev is working, but it’s slow. Also, I the scroll-ball of the Mighty Mouse does not trigger any events in xev at all, which means you have a regular 3-button mouse without scrolling functionality. I reckon Apple is using its own protocol here.

Another major pain is the Broadcom BCM4310. Neither can I find appropriate Windows drivers for the PCI device 14e4:4312 to be run under ndiswrapper, nor have my attempts at getting the free bcm43xx drivers to work with this chipset been successful. All I’ve been able to extract after some quick-and-dirty patching of the driver was to find out that the BCM4310 seems to be using 4 cores, all of which have Core IDs and revisions that are currently not known to the bcm43xx driver. This was after several OOPSen and reboots. Sigh. Gotta contact the mailing list, I guess.

The infrared receiver and the iSight are hanging of a USB bus. This means that the Linux Firewire iSight drivers need to be adapted as well. I haven’t toyed with the IR receiver yet, so I don’t know yet how hard it is to get that one working.

Oh, and yes. Everything else seems to be running fine. Even Windows XP in a VMware in full-screen mode (with both cores, whoot!) 

Of course, some of you might argue that I’ve been lucky to get that much of Linux running on this machine at all. To this I counter that I bought this machine for exactly the purpose of being able to dual-boot x86 Linux and OSX and that I have great faith that we will get driver support for all of the components eventually.

Because all sites mention the installation on an external USB HDD: My installation is on a partition of the internal hard drive and dual-boots just with with OSX.

Update: I do have the Broadcom working with ndiswrapper now. Try the Broadcom 802.11a/b/g drivers supplied by Hewlett-Packard for the tc4200 tablet PC. They work just fine, even with WPA-PSK.

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