IMac Troubleshooting

iMac 24" (7,1)

No Sound (Ubuntu 10.04)

Out of box, sound won't be coming out of the speakers, regardless of how much meddling you attempt in alsamixer. Here's the audio device and driver in use:

   oem@freekbox:~$ lspci -k | grep -i -A2 audio
   00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
           Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
           Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

In order to fix this, create a file under /etc/modprobe.d/options and enter the following:

   options snd-hda-intel model=imac24

and reboot the system. Prepare to be blown away by Ubuntu's awful drum sound.

iMac 20" (7,1)

No Wireless (Ubuntu 10.04)

Unfortunately, the Broadcom wireless card included with this model doesn't not have a suitable driver for Lucid's kernel (2.6.32). Broadcom's proprietary STA driver works only intermittently at best, and frequently breaks when kernel patches are pushed out. In order to enable the STA driver, when possible, enter the following in a terminal:

   oem@freekbox:~$ sudo jockey-text -e kmod:wl

If you get any guff, you're probably out of luck. Attempts at troubleshooting have included: manually blacklisting alternative drivers and installing STA package; Downloading the driver from Broadcom's website and compiling from source, repeating steps above; backporting newer kernels (Oneiric's 3.0 kernel) into Lucid, repeating steps above. Booting from live environments of both Oneiric and Precise have shown that wireless does indeed "just work" with newer releases.

iMac G4 17" (PowerMac 6,3)

List of issues so far encountered

• Sound doesn't work, no sound cards recognized (fixt)
• Compositing issue prevents windows from rendering inbottom half of screen (fixt)
• Wireless (fixt)
• No flash (fixt... ish)
• Unable to read DVD-Video even w/ URE+VLC installed
• Won't render large bodies of anti-aliased font (seen in terminal, firefox, etc)
• Second display detected (fixt)

Will lay out steps taken on each of these issues soon. In the meantime, need to spend more time investigating the nouveau driver to see if tweaking its various settings will address the performance/rendering issues still encountered. Also, video-codecs.

God willing, the G5's will be much kinder.