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Macbook Pro
I have got myself a new shiny Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro. I installed Debian Etch.rc1 for AMD64 on it as OSX is just not my kind of OS. The situation for Linux on Macbooks has improved a little since Willaim Stein wrote his summary on how to get Linux running on his Macbook Pro. Basically, you will want to follow one of of the many wiki pages on that matter or - better - several as the information is a bit scattered.
However, there is stuff that doesn’t work, some of which is pretty annoying:
- Wireless, if you are running a 64-bit system there is nothing you can do right now but wait. If you go for a 32-bit system you may use ndiswrapper which loads and interfaces with the Windows driver for you. As it is a scary idea to have a blob as a network driver you might hesitate. But the situation won’t be much better once the madwifi driver comes out as it relies on a blob as well.
- Suspend-to-RAM. Opposed to many peoples experience my Macbook Pro doesn’t suspend and resume properly. Instead it suspends and reboots on lid open. I haven’t tested out all s2ram combinations yet, though.
- Long battery runtime. My old notebook gave me 4-6 hours of battery time with the extended battery I used to attached. My new Macbook Pro lasts two hours max with a the CPU scaling and dimming in effect. This seems to be a Linux issue as OSX does have better power management: up to four hours.
Stuff that works, includes:
- The other hardware as far as I have tested it. You propably want to have a linux kernel 2.6.19, use the stock Debian config as a starting point and modularize everything (e.g. appleir didn’t work built-in but works as a module for me)
- If you go for the 64-bit version some things don’t work as expected, mostly proprietary stuff, but most stuff works: For a Flash plugin use the nspluginwrapper, for a Java plugin use the JRE 1.4 by blackdown, ATI’s driver supports 64-bit, VMWare needs the any-any patches and some ia32 libs.
- Apparently, you can run the instance of Windows XP you triple-boot on your notebook in VMWare under Linux.
- Graphics performance is quite good, e.g. I played the Quake 4 demo. If you have the full version of that game then make sure you use Version 1.0.5 which adds support for SMP and will run noticeably faster.
- Number crunching is also impressively fast. I get a gmpbench score of 6728. However, Jason Martin’s Core 2 Duo GMP patches don’t affect the performance. Maybe this is because of the different “microarchitecture” used in notebooks compared to desktop variants of the Core 2 Duo? I don’t know.
Btw.: SAGE builds out of the box in 64-bit mode if you export SAGE64=”yes” before you type make.
