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Installing Fedora 11 on a MacBook

Chris — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:39:39 +0000

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.

Basic installation instructions

If you're new to installing Linux then these steps should help you. If you're an old hand then skip below to view the post-installation steps necessary to fix the things that don't "just work".

Update the MacBook firmware to the latest version. If you prefer, you may use the standard "Software Update" in OS X.
Get your Fedora 11 installation DVD ready. Note: you should use the x86_64 version of Fedora 11 and that I have only tested this using the Installation DVD, not the Live CD/DVD.
Install rEFIt on OS X if you want a boot menu to select between OS X/Fedora to appear on every boot. This is highly recommended but optional - this guide assumes you have installed rEFIt. You can make Fedora boot by default and change the menu timeout by editing the "refit.conf" file (described on the rEFIt website).
Use the OS X partition manager in Disk Utility to resize your OS X partition and make space for Fedora. On my 260GB hard drive, I shrank the OS X (hfs+) partition to 120GB to leave about 130GB free space for Fedora. Insert your Fedora 11 installation DVD in the drive and reboot.
If you have rEFIt installed, then on boot you will be given the option to boot from the DVD, choose it. If you don't have rEFIt installed, then hold down "C" to boot from the DVD.
Install Fedora as usual, except:

In the partitioner, select to manually edit partition table and create your new partitions in the free space you created above
Create a 200MB ext3 boot partition with mountpoint '/boot' (this will be /dev/sda3)
Create a new ext4 partition with mountpoint '/' - this will be your main Fedora partition on /dev/sda4. Make sure to leave 2GB free space after this partition for your swap partition
With the remaining 2GB, create a linux swap partition - this will be /dev/sda5

Finish the installation and reboot. Remove the DVD.
If you installed rEFIt, you should have a choice between booting OS X and Linux. Use the arrow keys and Enter to select Linux.
Log in to Fedora
Follow the steps in the sections below to work around things that still do not work out-of-the-box in Fedora 11.

Post installation

Note: The wireless on the MacBook doesn't work out of the box in Fedora, so you're going to need an ethernet internet connection available until we get round to fixing the wireless later in this guide.

It is very important now to update your Fedora installation to the latest packages using yum. To do so:

su -
yum update

Once yum has finished updating, reboot, and then do a yum update again. Repeat this process until yum finds no more packages to update.

Fixing the wireless

The MacBook 4,1 comes with a Broadcom 4328 wireless chipset. This is not supported by default in Fedora 11 and there are two options to make it work: using ndiswrapper and Windows drivers or using the new official Broadcom STA wireless driver. In this guide we will use the official Broadcom driver because it is easier and more reliable.

1) Enable the rpmfusion non-free repository.

The broadcom-wl and wl-kmod RPMs that we need are in the rpmfusion.org non-free repository which also requires the rpmfusion.org free repository. To enable these repos in Fedora simply do this:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

2) Update and install the driver package

Now that you have the appropriate repository enabled, to install the driver package we first ensure that we have the latest updates and then install the "kmod-wl" package which will bring with it the required "broadcom-wl" package:

su -
yum update
yum install kmod-wl

That's all there is to it. At this stage you may need to reboot in order to enable the new driver and any new kernel that was installed during the update. For more details or if you have any difficulties see this post.

When future kernels are released a simple "yum update" command should install the new kernel and also pull in the updated Broadcom driver for that new kernel.

Fixing the touchpad

Note, for aluminum MacBook users at the time of writing the touchpad does not work at all. There is a bug report here and it looks like a solution may come with a kernel update any time soon.

For everyone else, the touchpad works out of the box but just needs a few settings to make it work with two finger scrolling and two finger clicking. In Gnome, go to System -> Preferences -> Mouse and then select the Touchpad tab. Enable the option for two-finger scrolling. You may also want to enable the option to disable the touchpad while typing. You can now scroll with two fingers, right click by holding down two fingers and clicking, and middle click by holding down 3 fingers and clicking.

iSight camera

First of all, you will need a copy of the firmware from Apple. You can either download this here, or copy it from a Mac OS X partition. While the latter is usually preferred I can't guarantee that the firmware distributed with your MacBook will be supported, so sometimes its easier just to download it.

To acquire the firmware, save the file AppleUSBVideoSupport to your home directory. Next, we need to convert the AppleUSBVideoSupport to a useable firmware file. The isight-firmware-tools will do this for us so we need to install that package:

su -c "yum install isight-firmware-tools"

Now, finally, we can convert the AppleUSBVideoSupport to a useable firmware file. From your home directory where you downloaded the AppleUSBVideoSupport file:

su -c "ift-extract --apple-driver AppleUSBVideoSupport"

Reboot and your webcam should be functional. Test it with Cheese, Ekiga, or Skype2. At the time of writing there is a bug in gstreamer which makes the webcam output all green, I have raised a bug report for it, feel free to add a "me too" and we'll see if it gets fixed.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works out of the box but due to some long standing kernel bug it needs to be enabled properly first.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/bluetooth and make sure it says 'HID2HCI_ENABLE=true'.

That'll fix it on subsequent reboots. For now, just run '/sbin/hid2hci' as root.

Fixing the brightness keys

The brightness keys don't work but I have found a work around that fixes them.

To fix, disable kernel mode setting (KMS) by adding the following to the kernel parameters in /etc/grub.conf after "rhgb quiet":

nomodeset

And if you still want the graphical boot screen then add this also:

vga=0x318

While playing with these changes it is sensible to add a timeout value to grub.conf also so you can easily edit the boot config in case anything goes wrong...

So my grub.conf looks like this:

default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.29.4-167.fc11.x86_64)
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.29.4-167.fc11.x86_64 ro root=UUID=9efa16ed-8e34-4e88-9d7e-253fd5f9b43c rhgb quiet nomodeset vga=0x318
        initrd /initrd-2.6.29.4-167.fc11.x86_64.img

Note, your kernel and initrd paths may look different depending on your partition setup and the UUID will definitely be different so don't just copy and paste mine!! I am only showing the above so you can see where the "nomodeset vga=0x318" should go. Basically put it right after "rhgb quiet" on the kernel line.

Reboot and your screen brightness keys should be working fine.

Video driver for newer MacBooks

This only applies to MacBooks with an nVidia video card: newer white versions and all aluminum versions. You can check the type of video card by doing "lspci" and looking for the video card details.

For those with an nVidia card you can install the official nVidia drivers which give better performance and full 3D support. First ensure you have the rpmfusion repositories installed as in the above wireless section, then:

su -c 'yum install kmod-nvidia'

Reboot and you should be using the nVidia drivers.

What next?

Now your MacBook hardware should be fully functional so it is time to get busy adding the software you want and tweaking the system to your needs.

This guide by Mauriat Miranda is a great place to look for details of how to install common media players, codecs and fonts.

For the native 64bit flash plugin see this thread.

Have fun!

Installing Fedora 10 on a MacBook

Chris — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:55:45 +0000

This guide will help you through all the steps necessary for installing Fedora 10 on a MacBook Santa Rosa. This guide is currently aimed at Fedora 10 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 will work with the MacBook 3,1 (Late 2007) and newer but will NOT work with the new aluminium MacBooks since they have different hardware (especially the graphics card). These instructions are not suitable for the MacBook Pro either!!

This guide is based largely around my previous guide for Fedora 8, and again much credit goes to the people who created the original Ubuntu wiki guide.

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, compiz effects, firewire, CD/DVD reading and writing, function keys (brightness, volume etc), sound, and ethernet. Even the new "plymouth" graphical boot screen works fine once activated.

I have yet to try the infrared or connecting an external monitor. Everything else works with the tweaks described below, except for suspend and hibernate which seem generally pretty broken in F10 (as it was in F9 too). Update 7 November 2008: Suspend and hibernate are fixed with 2.6.27.7-134 kernel and newer. See bug report.

Basic installation instructions

If you're new to installing Linux then these steps should help you. If you're an old hand then skip below to view the post-installation steps necessary to fix the things that don't "just work".

Update the MacBook firmware to the latest version. If you prefer, you may use the standard "Software Update" in OS X.
Get your Fedora 10 installation DVD ready. Note: you should use the x86_64 version of Fedora 10 and that I have only tested this using the Install Media, not the Live DVD.
Install rEFIt on OS X if you want a boot menu to select between OS X/Fedora to appear on every boot. This is highly recommended but optional - this guide assumes you have installed rEFIt. You can make Fedora boot by default and change the menu timeout by editing the "refit.conf" file (described on the rEFIt website).
Use the OS X partition manager in Disk Utility to resize your OS X partition and make space for Fedora. On my 260GB hard drive, I shrank the OS X (hfs+) partition to 120GB to leave about 130GB for Fedora. Insert your Fedora 10 installation DVD in the drive and reboot.
If you have rEFIt installed, then on boot you will be given the option to boot from the DVD, choose it. If you don't have rEFIt installed, then hold down "C" to boot from the DVD.
Install Fedora as usual, except:

In the partitioner, select to manually edit partition table
Create a 200MB boot partition with mountpoint '/boot' (this will be /dev/sda3)
Create a new ext3 partition with mountpoint '/' - this will be your main Fedora partition on /dev/sda4. Make sure to leave 2GB free space after this partition for your swap partition
With the remaining 2GB, create a linux swap partition - this will be /dev/sda5

Finish the installation and reboot.
If you installed rEFIt, you should have a choice between booting OS X and Linux. Use the arrow keys and Enter to select Linux.
Log in to Fedora
Follow the steps in the sections below to work around things that still do not work out-of-the-box in Fedora 10.

Post installation

It is very important now to update your Fedora installation to the latest packages using yum. To do so:

su -
yum update

Once yum has finished updating, reboot, and then do a yum update again. Repeat this process until yum finds no more packages to update.

Fixing the wireless

The MacBook comes with a Broadcom 4328 wireless chipset. This is not supported by default in Fedora 10 and there are two options to make it work: using ndiswrapper and Windows drivers or using the new official Broadcom STA wireless driver. In this guide we will use the official Broadcom driver because it is easier and more reliable.

1) Enable the rpmfusion non-free repository.

The broadcom-wl and wl-kmod RPMs that we need are in the rpmfusion.org non-free repository which also requires the rpmfusion.org free repository. To enable these repos in Fedora simply do this:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

2) Update and install the driver package

Now that you have the appropriate repository enabled, to install the driver package we first ensure that we have the latest updates and then install the "broadcom-wl" package which will bring with it the required "kmod-wl" package:

su -
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

When future kernels are released a simple "yum update" command should install the new kernel and also pull in the updated Broadcom driver for that new kernel.

Fixing the touchpad

(Thanks to bodom_lx for this tip)

The touchpad works out of the box but there is no way to right or middle click. Traditionally this was fixed by adding the appropriate options to /etc/X11/xorg.conf but the new xorg-server in F10 doesn't use the traditional xorg.conf file. Instead it is configured through HAL fdi configuration files.

To create the appropriate file for configuring the touchpad:

su -
gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/appletouch.fdi

Copy and paste the following into the empty file:

Save the file and reboot. You should now be able to right-click by using a two finger tap on the touchpad and middle-click by using a three finger tap. You can also right-click by holding two fingers on the touchpad and clicking the button, and middle-click by holding three fingers and clicking the button.

If you want to adjust any of the options (or add new ones) see "man synaptics" for an explanation of what they do.

Disable touchpad while typing

The placement and sensitivity of the MacBook touchpad means that it is prone to moving your cursor while you're typing which is very annoying. We can fix this:

To disable the touchpad while typing use this command:

syndaemon -i 1 -d

This disables the touchpad for 1 second after you type something. This works well but if you go back and forth a lot it can be a hassle to wait that one second. NOTE you can use ".5" for half a seconf instead and it works much better.

Alternatively,

syndaemon -t -d

This disables tapping motions but not movement while typing.

Both work fine, and the one that works best for you will likely be determined by the type of computing you do. Try them both and decide for yourself.

Once you've found the one you want to use, add it as an application to start in your gnome session.

iSight camera

su -c "yum install isight-firmware-tools"

Now, finally, we can convert the AppleUSBVideoSupport to a useable firmware file. From your home directory where you downloaded the AppleUSBVideoSupport file:

su -c ift-extract --apple-driver AppleUSBVideoSupport

Reboot and your webcam should be fully functionally. Test it with Cheese, Ekiga, or Skype2.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works out of the box but due to some kernel bug it needs to be enabled properly first.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/bluetooth and make sure it says 'HID2HCI_ENABLE=true'.

That'll fix it on subsequent reboots. For now, just run '/sbin/hid2hci' as root.

Apple SMC (Optional)

This is an optional but recommended step. The Apple SMC (System Management Controller) provides an interface to devices such as fans, temperature sensors, motion sensors, leds and controls these.

The applesmc kernel module is not loaded by default - I guess this is a bug. The correct way to load a module on boot in Fedora 10 is to create a .modules file in /etc/sysconfig/modules/ - here is how to do it for applesmc:

su -
gedit /etc/sysconfig/modules/applesmc.modules

Paste the following into the file:

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -d /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768 ] ; then
        exec /sbin/modprobe applesmc >/dev/null 2>&1
fi

Save and exit, then change the file permissions as follows:

chmod 755 /etc/sysconfig/modules/applesmc.modules

On next boot the applesmc module will load. Meanwhile, just do "modprobe applesmc" as root.

Plymouth graphical boot (Optional)

To activate the plymouth graphical boot you must edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add your framebuffer resolution at the end of the kernel line. For the MacBook with Intel graphics the resolution that works is "0x318". So, become root and edit the kernel line to look something like this:

title Fedora (2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64)
	root (hd0,2)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 ro root=UUID=afb18b52-bfdf-49aa-95f0-234d3013f87d rhgb quiet vga=0x318
	initrd /initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64.img

By default only the solar and text themes are installed. To add additional plymouth themes type:

su -
yum install plymouth-plugin-{fade-in,pulser,spinfinity}

Now you can try any theme you want like shown below, just replace pluginname with one of the following: solar, fade-in, pulser, spinfinity, text:

su -
plymouth-set-default-plugin pluginname
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

After that just reboot your computer to enjoy a lovely graphical boot.

What next?

Now your MacBook hardware should be fully functional so it is time to get busy adding the software you want and tweaking the system to your needs.

This guide by Mauriat Miranda is a great place to look for details of how to install common media players, codecs and fonts.

For the native 64bit flash plugin see this post.

Have fun!

Custom build of synaptics for Fedora 8 x86_64 on MacBook

Chris — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:39:41 +0000

Based on the patches found in this post over at Ubuntu forums I have created an updated synaptics touchpad driver RPM package for Fedora 8 x86_64.

As the original author notes, this makes it more enjoyable to use the touchpad while using the MacBook. It does two things:

Adds the option "MultiFingerButton" to synaptics. This allows us to configure the touchpad to right-click and middle-click by placing two or three fingers on the pad and then clicking the button. In my experience this is far more reliable than the "two finger tap" method of right-clicking.
It makes the mouse arrow more stable - I have found this to be a HUGE improvement in usability over the stock synaptics driver. With the original driver, if you put two fingers on the mousepad and release only one, the mouse arrow moves. This is the default behaviour in Linux and Windows, but in MacOSX, the mouse arrow stays put, and in my personal opinion, this is a much better behaviour. This patch makes it behave just like MacOSX. This may not sound much, but you'll find it makes a huge difference to the stability and usability of the touchpad.

Install the RPM from my Fedora 8 page and add this option to the InputDevice Section in your xorg.conf, just like this:

	Option		"MultiFingerButton"	"1"

	Option		"MultiFingerButton"	"2"

With the value 1, you get middle-clicking if you click the button while resting two fingers on the mousepad, and right-clicking while resting three fingers.

With the value 2, it reverses, and you get right-clicking if you click while resting two fingers on the mousepad, and middle-clicking while resting three fingers. This is the behaviour in MacOSX.

Try it out, and give your opinion. If you don't like it, you can always revert to the default Fedora package.

Fedora kernel fixes and files for MacBook 3,1 (Santa Rosa)

Chris — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:03:00 +0000

Following on from my previous post, I have been making some RPM packages available for Fedora 8 and the MacBook 3,1 Santa Rosa.

The kernel packages are not needed now since Fedora 8 kernel 2.6.24.3-50 (and newer) already contains the MacBook specific fixes. However, at the time of writing the gstreamer packages are still required if you want to use gstreamer based applications with the MacBook iSight camera.

Before downloading, please take care of my bandwidth. If you don't need the package, please don't download it.

You can download the packages here.

There is also this thread at fedoraforum.org which may be helpful.

If you find any problems or have any suggestions please let me know.

Installing Fedora 8 on a MacBook

Chris — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:16:18 +0000

The MacBook is great, but OS X is not really my cup of tea and I choose not to use Windows. Luckily Fedora 8 works like a charm on the MacBook and with a bit of configuring you can get all the hardware working properly.

I couldn't find any information on the lazyweb about installing Fedora 8 on a MacBook so I recorded what I did and made a detailed how-to which is posted in the wiki over at mactel-linux.org. The guide shows you step-by-step how to install and configure Fedora 8 x86_64 on the MacBook and works with both MacBook version 3,1 (from late 2007) or version 4,1 (from early 2008).

Big up to the guys at Fedora who gave in to my relentless nagging and integrated some of the mactel-linux patches into the latest Fedora kernels. Without them I'd still be spending my weekends rolling kernels!

If you find the guide useful or have any comments or suggestions then let me know.