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This guide will help you through all the steps necessary for installing Fedora 11 on a MacBook Santa Rosa. This guide is aimed at Fedora 11 x86_64 but will also work on i386 version (adjust as necessary). Most of the steps equally apply to pre-Santa Rosa models too.

These instructions are specific to the MacBook 3,1 (Late 2007) and newer but not the new aluminium MacBooks since they have different hardware (especially the graphics card). These instructions are not suitable for the MacBook Pro either!! That said, many of the steps here are common to all MacBook models and I have included a few tips for people with the Aluminum MacBooks.

This guide is based largely around my previous guides for Fedora 8 and Fedora 10. This guide is much shorter than the previous two guides and that can only be a good thing!

What works and what doesn't?

There are a few things that need fixing (covered in detail below) but the following all work "out of the box" with Fedora 10: video/graphics, firewire, USB, CD/DVD reading and writing, suspend/hibernate, cpu speed control, fan control (including applesmc), volume function keys, sound, and ethernet. Even the new "plymouth" graphical boot screen works out of the box.

I have yet to try the infrared or connecting an external monitor but I suspect they work just fine. Everything else works with the tweaks described below.

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These are updated instructions for installing the Broadcom Wireless STA driver in Fedora 11. This driver is for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware.

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Just got Fedora 11 up and running on my MacBook and it's pretty damn good, nothing ground breaking but it seems like another solid release from the Red Hat folks and builds nicely on the foundations of Fedora 10. Here's what I noticed so far compared to Fedora 10:

• The installation process is way more streamlined - only took 20mins for me and that was including some custom parititioning and messing with the selected packages. Also has a whole lot more polished feel about it. Great work by the Anaconda team.
• Boot time is improved. I can't say how much quicker but it feels like it boots faster than Fedora 10, and gnome seems to login quicker too. I think they met their 20 second target time. Nice.
• Gnome 2.26 - this is a minor update but has some nice features - Volume Control and support for multiple monitors are greatly improved.
• Improved input device configuration and updated synaptics driver - this is huge. I especially like the fact that there is now an option to enable 2 finger scrolling on a touchpad without messing with HAL fdi files. The MacBook touchpad now works really nicely without having to getting knee deep in config files.
• Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3. Both beta releases but both seem stable and Thunderbird 3 finally has some half-decent search function and offline message caching.
• Elisa Media Centre 0.5.37 - updated version that works really nicely. It was badly broken in F10 on my hardware.
• Intel video drivers - these seem greatly improved since 10. No more system crashes when using 3D effect (touch wood).
• Kernel - applesmc actually loads automatically now on a MacBook 4,1.

The bad: gstreamer is still broken with my webcam and gstreamer-properties refuses to save the custom config that would make it work.

It's all minor stuff, but still it's a big improvement over Fedora 10 which in turn was a big improvement over Fedora 9.