Fedora 13 Goddard on MacBook Aluminum 5,1 [Guide]
Update: May 25, 2010 — I was able to take some time to verify the following steps to installing Fedora 13 Final on MacBook Aluminum 5,1. Enjoy!
This is my guide to getting Fedora 13 Goddard running on a MacBook Aluminium 5,1 (I believe this should work on more recent generations as well because the only difference was the addition of the SD card slot and Firewire port). As with Fedora 12, there were many things that worked out of the box. I have created this guide to help others get Fedora 13 installed on their MacBook Aluminum.
Table of Contents:
Legend:
= Working out of the box (OBO)
= Working, but with comments
= Needs manual install
= Won’t work
= Not yet documented (TBD)
PreStep:
Gain internet access using a hard-wired Ethernet connection then install and enable the RPM Fusion repos for both the free and non-free packages which will get wireless networking up and running (and also the nvidia drivers if you wish):
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''
Apply all updates to the system:
yum upgrade
Yes, this step takes a bit of time, but it’s worth getting all the updated packages (less to fix).
Video:
The Nouveau drivers actually work out of the box, so nothing really needs to be done here, but if you want a better video experience including desktop effects (compiz), you’ll either need to get the proprietary Nvidia drivers from the RPM Fusion repository or enable the experimental 3D support from the Nouveau drivers using su -c ‘yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental’. Then, to enable desktop effects, simply go to “System -> Preferences -> Desktop Effects” and enable them.
Wireless:
su - yum -y install akmod-wl akmods kernel-PAE-devel akmods --akmod wl modprobe lib80211 modprobe wl exit
Bluetooth:
Bluetooth connections work out of the box. I was able to test a pair of bluetooth headphones and a bluetooth mouse.
Touchpad:
The touchpad works out of the box, but if you’d like to have two finger scrolling and such, navigate to the mouse settings in the main menu and select the “touchpad” tab:
“System -> Preferences -> Mouse”
Sound:
Sound works out of the box. This includes the headphones and internal speakers. Internal speakers turn off when headphones are plugged in and are turned back on when headphones are unplugged.
Function Keys:
These are working out of the box, including the backlight and audio keys, but not including the keyboard backlight.
Keymapping:
If you’d like to customize the keys a little more to your liking (for example, swapping the command and control keys), please refer to this fedora forums post.
Webcam:
Works out of the box. Open “Cheese Webcam Booth” from “Applications -> Sound and Video” to see.
Backlight:
Works out of the box.
Keyboard Backlight:
The keyboard backlight works, but you need to manually increase and decrease the brightness (as mentioned in a comment by “Min” below).
Max Brightness:
su -c 'echo 255 > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness'
Min Brightness:
su -c 'echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness'
Power/Battery:
With a fresh install of Fedora 13, I realized that the battery indicator is way off and I’m getting notifications that I only have so many minutes of battery left.
I would also like to make a few observations after a few days worth of using the MacBook with Fedora. In previous releases, it seemed that it tends to run hot and the battery life isn’t as good as it would be in Mac OSX. I’ll report back in a few days after using it.
Partition Scheme for Dual-Boot Mac OSX and Fedora 12
By Request:
This is my partition scheme for dual boot environment with Mac OSX and Fedora 13. I have a totally separate partition for sharing my files between both the OSs (which requires a change in UID in Fedora from 500 to 501):
Feel free to donate if this post prevented any headaches! Another way to show your appreciation is to take a gander at these relative ads that you may be interested in:
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There's 10 Comments So Far
April 24th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Hi, Thanks for the guide again, I will read before upgrading later. But i want to tell something, In fedora 12 you can
echo 255 > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness
as root to increase backlight keyboard at maximum
and 0 to make it off
It is manual but better than not
June 7th, 2010 at 4:05 am
HERE IS THE SOLUTION FOR THE KEYBOARD BACKLIGHT!!!!
… it is a tricky workaround but it is safe and works just fine
1) make the backlight accessible to all users (from root)
chmod a+w /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness
2) create a shell file in /usr/bin. Call it keylight. Inside the file write
#!/bin/bash
current=$(cat /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness)
new=$(($current$1))
if [ $new -ge 255 ]; then
new=255
fi
if [ $new -lt 0 ]; then
new=0
fi
echo $new > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness
3) make the new file executable
chmod a+x keylight
4) If everything is fine exit super user. You should be able to change the light issuing commands of the kind ‘keylight +25′ or dimming it with ‘keylight -50′
5) Implement this in your gnome dektop (KDE must have something similar). Uing graphic interface
system>preferences>keyboard shortcut
click on add
create a “keyboard backlight up” and set its command “keylight +25″
create a “keyboard backlight dw” and set its command “keylight -25″
6) assign the shortcuts to fn + f6 and fn + f5
AND VIOLLA!!!!!
June 7th, 2010 at 8:20 am
Very clever! Thank you for sharing.
June 11th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
To get wireless working I just had to “yum install kmod-wl” and reboot.
Webcam worked out of the box.
July 19th, 2010 at 8:24 am
Have you had any heat issues running Fedora, or any other Linux distro, on the Macbook 5,1? I could not use Ubuntu for this reason and there where no solotuin to make Macbook run cooler with Ubuntu. My fan was spinning on 6000 RPM and the CPU was around 50c while the GPU hit around 70-80 by just browsing the web. If I watched you tube or anything else that needed more from the graphic card, I could use my Macbook as a frying pan after a while…
Well, for now I run Linux on a PC instead, but would be nice to get some feedback of how Linux works on Macbook 5,1 for you other people out there.
August 14th, 2010 at 2:04 am
I can confirm it works great now. Don’t have have the heat problem anymore and the system works great! :)
Fedora rocks!
August 23rd, 2010 at 2:08 am
@Soderstrom
Did the heat problem solve after update ? Did you install something???? I installed the Fedora on my macbook 5.5. The laptop heats up.
August 29th, 2010 at 4:13 am
Just done a fresh install of Fedora 13 on my MacBook 5,1 (October 2008) and I still have the heat issues – CPU cores idling at 64C when all I have open is Firefox.
Also, the touchpad seems to be very sensitive, I really have to be careful when I right-click (aka two-finger tap) as it sometimes ends up detecting a left-click instead.
Are there any tweaks that can be made to the configuration files to make the touchpad a little less sensitive for taps?
It’s unfortunate that there’s two fairly big problems (heat and touchpad) – otherwise this would be perfect!!
Cheers,
Craig
August 30th, 2010 at 7:42 am
I’m with you… still a ton of heat with F13.
August 30th, 2010 at 7:46 am
Heat is an issue. So far, I haven’t been able to figure it out and nobody has stepped up to the challenge.
That’s odd… the touchpad seemed to work really well out of the box for me. You’ll want to ask around at the Fedora Forums for some help with setting up your touchpad I guess. I can’t remember what files are responsible for the touchpad settings (something in /etc, I’m sure).
I wonder what F14 or F15 will have in store for us macbook users…
Share your thoughts, leave a comment!