Stuff That Works
Sleep
Even though sleep got fixed for Dapper, something in Edgy broke it again.
You can, however, install the Feisty prerelease kernel on your system
and then everything will work great.
It turns out that one does not need to do a full vbetool save/restore of
the video BIOS. The only register of interest that is clobbered by the
suspend/resume cycle is the backlight control register. See
Launchpad #72287 for a
temporary workaround to this problem.
If you want to use vbetool, you need to know that currently, on Macbooks
this is broken. This is caused by a mistake: the vbesave init script
comes before the acpi init script. This means that laptop-detect will
report to vbesave that you are not on a laptop and vbesave will not
save your vbestate. Matthew Garrett is working on a fix, but in the
mean time a workaround is to edit /usr/sbin/laptop-detect and insert
a line 'exit 0' right after the #!/bin/sh (always report that we're
a laptop).
Video
The video chip in the Macbook is an Intel 945GM. This uses the i810
driver.
As per default, the card is incorrectly configured and won't let you
use the native resolution of the LCD (1280x800). You need to download
and use the 915resolution utility to correct this. A package is
available in the universe repository.
apt-get install 915resolution
Due to recent changes in the 915resolution package the native panel
resolution is now detected via 'vbetool' and you no longer need to
modify the 915resolution config. Thanks to Joel Stanley for pointing
this out.
When you reboot your Macbook the display should be working properly.
Backlight Control
Not supported in Dapper as per default, so I reverse engineered the
AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext kernel extension and found the
memory address of the register responsible for controlling it.
After experimenting with poking random values at it I wrote a program
which controls it. This program is a temporary hack. I've also added
support for macbook backlight control to HAL (patch awaiting upstream
approval) since this is the proper fix. See
Launchpad #72287 for more
information.
You can download the C source for the program here:
Macbook Backlight Control. You need to link against libpci with -lpci. Make sure you
have pciutils-dev installed. If you want to use the old version that
has the hard-coded video card address (and does not require libpci), it
is still available in the same directory, called macbook-backlight-old.c.
If you intend to use the program as a normal user you'll have to install
it setuid root as it needs access to /dev/mem to function.
note: this program does not work for macbook pro -
only macbook.
update: The program now automatically detects the video
card address via libpci.
Direct Rendering
Direct rendering Just Worked(tm). The integrated chipset seems to be
beefy enough to do simple things like glxgears and the Flurry
screensaver. AIGLX with beryl is running nicely but when I use it it
makes me miss metacity -- so I don't.
Sound
In Edgy, sound just works.
Ethernet
In Edgy, wired ethernet just works.
Basic Keyboard/Touchpad Functionality
The keyboard and the touchpad are both USB HID devices and work as
well as you'd expect any generic USB device to work.
Advanced Keyboard Features
In Edgy, the 'fn' key on the keyboard works. By default, the F1 key
will modify the screen brightness (and so on) and you have to press
Fn+F1 in order to get F1.
If you prefer your F1 key to actually be F1, create a file in
/etc/modprobe.d/ with the following content:
options usbhid pb_fnmode=2
Wireless
Wireless works out of the box in Edgy. If you installed the Feisty
kernel, however, you will be unhappy since the driver oopses on load.
You should download and install madwifi from subversion. See
Launchpad #76294.
If you're running a Macbook, the only closed source driver you need is
madwifi. It makes a lot of sense to get rid of linux-restricted-modules
entirely and just build your own (since this avoids all the cruft with
the tmpfs and linking-at-bootup). You don't have to worry about
violating the GPL since you're merely using the software (and not
redistributing it like Ubuntu is).
WPA works out of the box. Install the network-manager-gnome package.
It will make you happy.
Battery
The battery works just fine. I seem to get a bit more than 3 hours when
running Linux (as opposed to Apple's advertised 6 hour theoretical max).
You can improve battery life by unloading unused modules and by killing
powernowd and setting your scaling_governor to 'powersave' or 'ondemand'.
See Launchpad #13610.
DVD playback
Works fine, but make sure you use the regionset utility first. Also
make sure that you've installed libdvdcss properly according to the
instructions in
RestrictedFormats.
Booting via BIOS mode
The Macbooks ship with a version of the Apple firmware which includes
a BIOS mode for booting legacy operating systems. Ubuntu boots
fine under this mode. You need to use lilo, however as I'm told
GRUB makes an unsupported BIOS call.
I am using a fantastic program called
rEFIt. This program makes my life
substantially easier and let me understand a bit more about how EFI
works. Functionally, it serves as a easy (and attractive) way to
select between Ubuntu and OSX on startup.
Remote Control
Works with the 3rd party appleir driver.
The driver is a bit buggy, though. For example, if you point another
(non-apple) remote at the receiver the driver will transmit a
never-ending stream of the last button you pressed.
Video Out
Just works. I gave a talk at linux.conf.au using this and was happy.
iSight
Not working by default, but not too hard to get working.
Download this
linux-uvc package
and extract it. You want the extract.c utility included inside. The
driver itself is already included in the Feisty kernel.
Grab your iSight driver from your MacOS partition. You'll find it in
/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport. As root, run 'extract' on
this file and the firmware should be installed. The kernel driver will
automatically notice the firmware has been loaded and will setup a v4l2
device for you to use.
If you fancy looking at yourself, give this gstreamer pipeline a go:
gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src use-fixed-fps=false ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ximagesink
Some sources on the net report that loading the firmware once is
sufficient to always have it loaded in the future. As far as I can tell,
this is not true. The firmware, for example, doesn't survive across a
cold boot. The simple solution, of course, is to do firmware loading from
a startup script or just do it whenever you need to use the camera (which
is almost never for me).
Advanced Touchpad Features
Not working out of the box, but can be made to work with some work.
If you're using the Feisty kernel then the included version of the
appletouch driver supports the touchpad in the Macbook. If you have
Edgy kernel, you will need to patch it.
You need to ensure that the appletouch module is loaded before the usbhid
module (since otherwise the trackpad will start up in legacy USB HID
mode). You can create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ containing the
following line:
install usbhid /sbin/modprobe appletouch && sleep 2 && /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install usbhid $CMDLINE_OPTS
You then probably want to modify some settings for the Synaptics driver
in your X config file.
See this page for more information
about making your trackpad work.
If you want to use your keyboard to emulate additional mouse buttons
you can use the following method:
Install the 'xkbset' package. Write a small shellscript like this one:
#!/bin/sh
xmodmap -e 'keycode 116 = Pointer_Button2'
xmodmap -e 'keycode 108 = Pointer_Button3'
xkbset m
Then run this script when your GNOME session starts. It will set the
right meta and 'enter' keys to act as your middle and right mouse
buttons, respectively. Of course, you can change the keycodes if you
would prefer others.
If anyone is aware of a method to simplify this process (without
using the kernel driver) then please let me know. I'm
particularly interested in not enabling full-blown mousekeys mode
and in not having to install a 3rd party utility.
