Notes

Posted by lane

Note: See comment below to my link for the Fedora 11 experience.

I have Fedora 10 Beta running quite smoothly on the original MacBook Air. There are several good sites from which I got most of my information. They are:

• http://www.kerbyserver.net:82/drupal/node/25
• http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Fedora8OnMacBookSantaRosa#Wireless_installation_using_ndiswrapper
• http://nareshv.blogspot.com/2008/10/fedora-10-beta-64-bit-on-macbook-pro-41.html
• http://nareshv.blogspot.com/2008/09/fedora-9-on-macbook-pro-penryn-intel.html

Here are the steps I followed to get Fedora installed:

1. Use Boot Camp to make room for Fedora. Go through the wizard and resize the partitions. Then quit Boot Camp
2. Download rEFIt and install it on the Macbook Air
3. Download a Fedora Live CD to another Fedora Install. I tried quite unsuccessfully to get the Macbook Air to boot the live CD from a USB thumbdrive but was not able to do so ever. I was using the live cd tools command livecd-iso-to-disk to put the Live CD iso on the USB thumbdrive. rEFIt would recognize the thumbdrive and try to boot it but then give an error saying Apple’s firmware does not have good support for booting legacy OS’s.In the end I bought an external USB CDROM drive. Apple sells one that is expensive. I bought the cheapest one from Frye’s at $40. I put the Fedora Live CD on CD, plugged the external CDROM drive into the MacBook Air’s USB slot and booted. Hitting the Option during boot brings up rEFIt. It recognized linux on the CD and gave me the option to boot it.
4. The Live CD boot took a really long time and printed several warnings and errors during the process. It finally made it to the login screen. I auto-logged in and double clicked the Live Install option. During the install, I selected “Create Custom Layout” during the disk formatting option. I changed the third partition to ext3 and reduced its size by 2GB. I created a fourth partition of type swap. I made the third partition the root directory /. I then rebooted.
5. With linux installed, it booted much faster and without errors. I happened to have the USB to Ethernet adapter that Apple sells. This made getting everthing working much easier. The live cd is rather lean on programs, so I first did a yum update and installed some of the essentials like gcc, emacs, make, etc.
6. Wireless: To get wireless working I used ndiswrapper from the Livna repo. Download the livna repo file and install it:

   wget http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm
   rpm -ihv livna-release-9.rpm

   Then I disabled the livna repo by default in the /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo. Then install ndiswrapper and associated kernel module:

   yum install --enablerepo livna-development ndiswrapper kmod-ndiswrapper akmod-ndiswrapper

   Run the akmods command to build the ndiswrapper kernel module. Now download the windows driver for the Broadcom wireless adapter:

   wget ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp37501-38000/sp37950.exe

   I had to use Windows to unpack this file. Grab the bcmwl5.inf file and put it on the Air. Run the command

   ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
   ndiswrapper -ml
   ndiswrapper -mi
   ndiswrapper -m

   I then had to remove all the pci related lines out of the /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper file and leave only the alias wlan0 ndiswrapper line. Despite my best efforts with modprobe and ndiswrapper, I did not get a wlan0 network interface until I rebooted. After the reboot, wireless was working fine–except WPA.

7. Sound: Sound took me quite a while to get right. I tried adding options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3 to /etc/modprobe.d/sound as suggested on other places, and still sound would not play even through reboots. Various forums said to make sure the “Speaker” option was checked in the volume control dialog. That did not help. I was doing a lot of futzing with modprobing the snd_hda_intel driver with various models, including mbp3, laptop, viao, etc. I was doing this from a virtual terminal after teliniting to runlevel 3. Then, as root I started X from a virtual terminal using the startx command and suddenly sound was working. When I tried it as regular user, it was still working. It even continued to work through a reboot. So I am not sure why it started working, but it is working. Perhaps there was a permission issue with /dev/snd/* modules? I am not sure why logging in as root would have effected any permissions though. Perhaps the also settings were adjusted correctly when I logged in as root and now they are saved? I don’t know…
8. Keyboard:Fedora 10 does not come with an xorg.conf file. I created the following xorg.conf file to get multi-touch working:

   Section "ServerLayout"
      Identifier     "Default Layout"
      Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
      InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
      InputDevice    "Synaptics Touchpad" "CorePointer"
   EndSection
   
   #Section "Files"
   #   ModulePath      "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia"
   #   ModulePath      "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
   #EndSection
   
   Section "Module"
      Load           "synaptics"
      Load           "extmod"
      Load           "dbe"
      Load           "glx"
   EndSection
   
   Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier     "Synaptics Touchpad"
      Driver         "synaptics"
      Option         "SendCoreEvents" "true"
      Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
      Option         "Protocol" "auto-dev"
      Option         "SHMConfig" "true"
      Option         "LeftEdge" "10"
      Option         "RightEdge" "1200"
      Option         "TopEdge" "10"
      Option         "BottomEdge" "370"
      Option         "FingerLow" "10"
      Option         "FingerHigh" "20"
      Option         "MaxTapTime" "180"
      Option         "MaxTapMove" "220"
      Option         "SingleTapTimeout" "100"
      Option         "MaxDoubleTapTime" "180"
      Option         "LockedDrags" "off"
      Option         "MinSpeed" "1.10"
      Option         "MaxSpeed" "1.30"
      Option         "AccelFactor" "0.08"
      Option         "TapButton1" "1"
      Option         "TapButton2" "3"
      Option         "TapButton3" "2"
      Option         "RTCornerButton" "0"
      Option         "RBCornerButton" "0"
      Option         "LTCornerButton" "0"
      Option         "LBCornerButton" "0"
      Option         "VertScrollDelta" "20"
      Option         "HorizScrollDelta" "50"
      Option         "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
      Option         "VertEdgeScroll" "0"
      Option         "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
      Option         "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
   EndSection
   
   Section "InputDevice"
   
      # keyboard added by rhpxl
      Identifier     "Keyboard0"
      Driver         "kbd"
      Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
      Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Monitor"
      Identifier     "Monitor0"
      VendorName     "Unknown"
      ModelName      "Unknown"
      HorizSync       30.0 - 110.0
      VertRefresh     50.0 - 150.0
      Option         "DPMS"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Device"
      Identifier     "Videocard0"
   #   Driver         "nvidia"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Screen"
      Identifier     "Screen0"
      Device         "Videocard0"
      Monitor        "Monitor0"
      DefaultDepth    24
   
      Option        "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
      Option        "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
      Option        "TripleBuffer" "True"
      Option        "UseDamageEvents" "True"
      Option        "UseRandR" "True"
      Option        "RenderAccel" "True"
      Option        "NoPowerConnectorCheck" "False"
      Option        "RandRRotation" "True"
      Option        "DynamicTwinView" "True"
      Option        "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"
      Option        "ConnectToAcpid" "True"
      Option        "EnableACPIHotkeys" "True"
      Option        "UseEvents" "True"
      Option        "ExactModeTimingsDVI" "True"
      Option        "NvAGP" "0"
   
      SubSection     "Display"
          Viewport    0 0
          Depth       24
      EndSubSection
   EndSection
   
   Section "Extensions"
     Option        "Composite" "Enable"
   EndSection

9. Suspend: Suspend/resume works fine after creating an /etc/pm/config.d/unload_modules and with the single line:

   SUSPEND_MODULES=bcm5974

10. I installed pommed to get the function keys to work.

Issues

1. Don’t know how to right or middle click. Tapping the pad with two fingers initiates a right click, but still want middle click options.
2. WPA wireless is not working.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.