Posts Tagged “Linux”

Slightly adventurous Intel-based Mac owners seem to often be afraid or confused about installing Ubuntu along side OSX, but it is actually quite simple. There are some oddities that make it different from installing on a PC (but if it was the same, it wouldn’t be a Mac now would it?). Because of this, I am going to outline my easy install method that will leave you with a dual-boot system with OSX and Ubuntu (Those out there that want a Triple-Boot setup will require a bit more complication and I suggest just checking at ubuntuforums.org).

Intro / Setup

For the purposes of this article, I will be assuming that you have OSX Leopard (10.5) installed on your Mac (with some additional details for those with OSX < 10.5), and you would like to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex along side it. This should cover most users at the time of this writing.

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I decided to do a complete reinstall with Intrepid on my iMac. Everything went quite well, so I decided to share the steps that I took to do the install. Note that in the end, I want to dual-boot OS X and Ubuntu on my iMac with no other partitions. You will need to adjust your install for any custom setup you might want to have.

1. Download the Ubuntu 8.10 x64 Desktop iso and burn to a CD with Toast at the slowest possible speed.
2. Use DiskUtility to resize the OSX partition and make space on the hard drive for Ubuntu. Select your hard drive on the left side, and on the partition tab, click the “+” to add a partition to the disc. You can make this partition any format as it will just be removed later. Right now, we are just allocating space for the install.
3. I already had rEFIt installed, but if you do not have it yet, now is a good time to do it.
4. Make sure that the Ubuntu CD is in the drive and shutdown the iMac. Start it up again, and this time you should see the rEFIt menu on startup instead of the grey and white Apple logo screen. If you still boot directly into OS X, then you might need to perform the manual installation of rEFIt.
5. Once you have rEFIt working, you will be able to select the Ubuntu CD to boot. Eventually, you will get to the Ubuntu desktop.
6. Once there, go to System > Adminstration > Partition Editor. This will start gParted. In this application, you will see a graphical representation of the partitions on your hard drive similar to how DiskUtility does in OSX, except this will show ALL the partitions (even ones that Apple tries to hide) and free space on the disc too.
7. Near the Right end of the bar at the top, the partition that was created with DiskUtility will show. There will likely be a tiny bit of free space before and after this partition as well. At the beginning of the disk, there will be a EFI partition (don’t touch!) and the OS X partition (shows as an HFS+ filesystem). Select the FAT32 partition created in DiskUtility and delete. This will leave a bunch of free space on your hard drive for Ubuntu. When you are ready, click “Apply” and the partition will be deleted.You can now quit gparted.
8. Now,  start the installer with the icon on the desktop. Choose your language and then Timezone. (I chose English and the Central Time Zone [Chicago]). Why in Linux do we always have to choose a city for the time zone? I just want to specify the name of the time zone I am in!!
9. On the next screen select the Macintosh variant of your language’s keyboard. (I chose USA-Macintosh. This variant has always worked for me on my older White Apple Keyboard as well as my newer Aluminum Keyboard).
10. On the next screen, choose to install to the largest continuous free space on the hard drive. This will allow the installer to create a root and swap partition in the free space you left on the drive.
11. Next you will setup your user account and password. (I also chose to enable auto-login as I am the only person that uses this machine.)
12. On the final screen, click the Advanced button and choose to install GRUB to /dev/sda3. This is the Ubuntu root partition. Click OK for that and back at the summary screen, click Install to start the installation.
13. During the install play a little Tali or Tetravex . After the install is complete reboot the machine.

That is it for the basic installation. After the reboot I went to System > Admin > Hardware Drivers and enabled the “Broadcom STA driver” (not the B43 driver) to get the WiFi working. 3D Acceleration and “Extra” desktop effects worked with the default open source driver, but there seems to be an issue when using 3D graphics while desktop effects are enabled (to test this, you can enable the “Extra” desktop effects and then run ‘glxgears’ from the commandline). Turning off the desktop effects will fix the issue. Enabling the Proprietary ATI driver in the same place where you enabled the Broadcom driver will probably help that situation.

After all that, you can install any updated packages with the update manager and reboot. WiFi should now work. Stay tuned for other tweaks that I make to my machine to get things working the way I want.

It was recently announced that ath9k, the newest of the open Atheros Linux drivers, is now available. This is great news for Mac folks, as a majority of the MacBook and MacBook Pros out there have one of the newer 802.11n cards that is not really supported with madwifi, but this new driver supports.

Of course, it is Ubuntuforums user, volanin, to the rescue again who took it upon himself to backport the wireless-testing portion of the kernel to the 2.6.24-19 (and -20) kernel currently used in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and packaged this ath9k driver into a nice little deb file so that Ubuntu-On-Mac users will have easy access to use it on their machines without having to go through the trouble of compiling a custom kernel. Of course, this is not limited only to Mac users, but rather, any user with an up-to-date install of Hardy Heron will have the benefit of using this driver. A link to the download and full instructions can be found at the following thread. Enjoy!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5545069&postcount=5

Now, if only Broadcom could realize that they need to release an open driver driver just to keep up…

Update: A new kernel driver has been created that adds the multi-touch functionality to the Linux kernel rather than through a daemon. A version has already made its way into the vanilla kernel source.

New kernel driver for the BCM5974 touchpad (Macbook Air, Penryn)

I regular the Ubuntu Apple Intel forum and had the pleasure meeting a user, tannewt. He had just obtained a new Macbook Pro (with the multi-touch trackpad) and was very helpful in getting some of the first information about the new hardware into the forums. He also started hacking on the touchpad to make it a bit more useful since the new hardware was quite limited with the current available software

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We get the question or comment quite a bit that people are planning to purchase a Mac and want to run Ubuntu (or some other variant of Linux) on it exclusively. Now, this can be done, and you might end up with exactly what you want in the end, but I have to say, “Why in the world would you do that?”

Don’t get me wrong, I like my iMac, and I am even getting a Macbook Pro soon for work. I also like running Ubuntu on my iMac, but buying a Mac just to use Linux just doesn’t make any sense to me. There are so many other options out there for a linux-specifc application. With Dell now offering machines made specifically with Linux compatibility in mind in addition to the several linux-compatilible hardware vendors out there, it is way too easy to obtain hardware that can coexist with linux peacefully.

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I like to help in support forums for various things that I am interested in. I am not paid for it. I don’t do it for glory. I don’t do it for popularity. I am just interested in sharing my knowledge with others so that they might be able to do something that they were unable to do before.

I am not going to claim that Linux is the perfect OS and that anyone can use it. I think it just “makes sense” myself, but I also have a machine running Windows Vista that I use as a PVR, and I actually tend to spend more time on my iMac in OSX Leopard than I do in my Ubuntu install. I have the mindset to use whatever you want. I don’t preach Open Source. I am not a Apple fanatic. Yet, more than once, it has been the case that, when someone is frustrated in the Ubuntu Apple Users’ Forum (as well as elsewhere) they threaten to ‘leave’ Linux… to go back to Windows, or OSX, or whatever.

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This is something that is quite simple to do, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good How-Tos out there for it.

If you go the the skype webpage and look at the available downloads, you will notice that there is no 64bit version available for linux. There is a deb available for install on Ubuntu > 7.04 that is a normal 32bit, i386 package though. I am using the latest release of Ubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron).

There are a couple of things that skype requires before it will install. Fortunately, it is quite easy to install them since they are available in the Ubuntu repos.

sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui

This will install the libqt4-core libraries, and the libqt3-gui package. After that is done, we can install the skype deb. If you just double-click on it, gdebi will complain that the package is for the wrong architecture. Fortunately, since we are working on an Open Source OS, there are many other tools available to us, including those that allow us to force the install.

sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i skype-debian_2.0.0.68-1_i386.deb

The ‘force-architecture’ switch allows the dpkg command to ignore any architecture related errors and install skype. Be sure to use the appropriate filename for the deb package that you download. Skype should now be available from the “Internet” category under the “Applications” menu.

Knowing your Mac version is very helpful when asking for help in forums or mailing lists since hardware changes are made when Apple decides to update their machines.

Just use the following command. (I use Ubuntu by the way)

sudo dmidecode| grep Product

In the output, you should have a line that looks similar to:
Product Name: MacBookPro2,2

and in this case the version would be: MacBookPro2,2

Well, at last there is finally something relatively updated from the Gentoo camp. Beta1 of the Gentoo 2008.0 LiveCD was released on April 1, 2008  of all days (and no it wasn’t a joke believe it or not). Although that is about 1 month passed it’s scheduled release ( Personel Issues ), it seems to be an OK release from  my passing tests. The switch to xfce was a suprise, and the hardware recognition seems to be quite an improvement over the 2007.0 release. It might actually be worth having around again when the final release is finished.

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors2.xml

I finally got tired of not being able to find a good table of framebuffer resolution codes when I needed one, and when I did fine one it had the wrong value, or was decimal values only, etc. I gathered a bunch of info and made my own. If there are any errors, please let me know!