After the HP woes (which are incidentally ongoing, and if they didn’t make me so persistently pissed and angry I might actually write about them) and a nice tax refund check have caused me to go notebook shopping. After some looking I decided on a Black Macbook. After picking it up from Sweetwater, I promptly set about getting Linux loaded on it. I had done some looking before purchase, and knew the process wouldn’t be exactly seamless. It ended up being easier than expected in some areas and harder in others.
I primarily used the Community MacBook instructions from the Ubuntu wiki. Some brief notes on deviations when installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) Herd 3 on a new Macbook1:
- You can skips steps 6 and 7 completely. When you reboot after the installation completes you may receive an error message when selecting Linux. Just reboot, and select the rEFIt boot option to “enter rEFIt shell”. You’ll see the “do you want me to fix the MBR?” message; select Yes, reboot and you’re up and going.
- The wifi chipset on the newest MacBook (and perhaps MacBook Pros) is currently unsupported by MadWifi (bug report). However, ndiswrapper is able to wrap the Windows driver just fine. One report I read said to use a DLink driver. That worked for the most part, but caused intermittent kernel panics. Switching to the Lenovo driver, as described here
resolved that problemimproved the situation. (update 20 Feb 2007: the Lenovo driver is better, but still causes a kernel panic when I connect to a particular network; not sure what’s up with that) - The latest Feisty kernel (2.6.20-8) seems to bork the keyboard and trackpad. I just set grub to use 2.6.20-6, and all is well.
- Speaking of grub, you don’t seem to actually have keyboard support in grub… not sure what’s going on with that, since it works just fine in rEFIt.
- Getting the double/triple-tapping to work on the Trackpad (as described here) requires loading the
appletouchmodule beforeusbhid. Not being one to really crave fucking withinitrd, I just wrote a little script and installed it as/etc/rc2.d/S03appletouch. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument, but I fully expect that it’s just a temporary fix until things are fixed upstream:#! /bin/sh /sbin/rmmod appletouch /sbin/rmmod usbhid /sbin/modprobe appletouch /sbin/modprobe usbhid
Overall it makes a great Linux notebook: sleep and hibernate work out of the box, the sound is good, and the battery life is pretty decent too. Oh, and it’s pretty. Always important.
1 This is going on my blog and not my site because I imagine this is something of a moving target. Ubuntu 7.04 Herd 4 is already out, and I imagine lots of work will be done in the next 6 months. Your mileage may vary.
3 Comments
Hello,
Why did you broke my nice line to add into /etc/modprobe.d/appletouch into an ugly script hard-coded in rc2.d?
Loading modules is the job of modprobe, a pseudo rc script should not do it instead.
BTW, do you know about /etc/init.d/skeleton, update-rc.d and so long?
I did as wrote above but a strange thing happens : the /dev/sda4 partition ID changed from “83” (linux) to “EF” when i resync the MBR in refit at first boot.
I change it back manualy with fdisk, but the same thing happens evry times I resync the MBR with refit.
Any ideas ??
Simon: I hard coded the ugly script (which I fully acknowledge is ugly) because your solution for /etc/modprobe.d didn’t work for me. It seemed that yes, it did load the module, but because the device had already been identified by the usb_hid module, it didn’t actually work. The only way I could get things to work was to remove usbhid, load appletouch, then reload usbhid.
Unfortunately, samedi14, I have pretty much zero idea what’s going on with your MBR. I fully admit that I don’t grok the whole partition table syncing that refit does.
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