Mepis 8 on Macbook Pro

Submitted by admin on July 6, 2009 - 3:15pm

A little over a year ago my business partner talked me into buying a mac so we would both be working on the same platform. I bought a macbook pro generation 4,1. It has a broadcom 4328 wireless driver and Nvidia 8600.video

I gave it a good try, but there were so many times I was frustrated with not being able to do something as efficiently as I could in MEPIS/KDE. Perhaps I did not find the right mac forum but I was disappointed in the level of community support. In MEPIS I can read the forums or ask a questions and find the information I need. It was not so with the mac.
I installed MEPIS in VMWare and after a year realized that was where I was most of the time when on the mac. Last week, I decided to install mepis.

Live CD:
I tried setting the screen resolution when the live CD booted, the function keys are not working so that is not an option. It can be easily set later. I was able to get wireless working. I had no sound but I assumned that could be fixed after the install. So on to installing.

Partitioning:
The first step is partitioning the mac. This is done within Warren's mepis assistant for the mac.
I had 50GB available of 180 total
Tried giving mepis 30, then 24 then 20 all failed.
I finally tried 15GB and that did not fail. I planned to create a second partition but it would not let me do that so my install is on a single partition - home is not separate. I wish it had been a larger partition. There is a way to create partitions within the mac. I did not try doing that. This is a learning experience, I may go back and do things again later.

Install:
Occam has added to Warren's install instructions in the wiki. There is a point where grub fails, had I not had occam's fix I do not think I would have been able to finish the install. His specific instructions made it very easy.

Wireless:
I started with getting the wireless working. I had set my network to no encryption until things were working. All I had to do was be sure the wl driver was selected, choose my wireless SSID and restart the network.
I had to do this each time I restart or it wakes up. The start/restart on apply setting does not seem to stick.

Sound:
$ lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
Added model # to /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=82801H
Ran alsaconf now I have sound

Keyboard:
Go to control center and set keyboard to apple laptop

Touchpad/mouse:
The touchpad is very sensitive, so much so it is difficult to use. I have no right click or scroll out of the box. My first attempt at editing xorg resulted in a black screen and having to repair with the live CD. I added a USB mouse which works fine. I will try working with the touchpad later on.

sgfxi:
sgfxi is the best, thanks h2! I have a Nvidia 8600. The only issue I had was that I had to reboot to get to a console. Ctrl-Alt-F1 did not work. When I got to the command prompt, I had no wireless connection. I rebooted and added a wired connedtion. Rebooted into a console and the install was successful. Glx gears went from 250fps to 8500fps.

Display:
Before I installed the Nvidia driver, I was going to the control center and selecting 1440x900 as the resolution, accepting the change. Worked fine. With the Nvidia driver installed, the 1440x900 option is no longer available. I set it within the Nvidia settings.

Suspend:
Getting suspend to work was something I saw as a necessity. If I am at home I work on my desktop MEPIS not the laptop. The first time I tried just closing the lid, it put it into suspend but I had no way to wake it up, all I had was a black screen. I did two things before I tried suspend again, so I am not sure what fixed it.
1. I installed pommed. I left the preferences at the default
2. I installed the official Nvidia driver
Now when I close the lid, it goes into suspend. When I open it, there is a screen with wide black and white stripes for a few seconds then it goes black then I get my screensaver. move the mouse and you get a login.
My network still showed as connected, had an IP address but I had to restart it before I could connect to the internet. This was not ideal. I found a fix here http://mepislovers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=21353&page=2
install dhcpcd and install wicd
Configure wicd to use dhcpcd instead of dhclient.

WICD:
Installed wicd. It works great. I re-enabled WAP2 on my airport extreme, entered the password and wicd connected.

USB external hard drives, flash drives:
Plugged in a jump drive. It's light flickered and went off. The drive was not recognized. I tried another and an external hard drive. None recognized. Luckily, I tried my camera. It popped right up. After that so did all the others that had not worked before.

Laptop was getting very hot whan using it as a mac. It seems to run much cooler in MEPIS.

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