Posts Tagged “Mactel”

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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There has been a bit of confusion on how to get the iSight working on many of the Intel Macs recently. Fortunately, the newer MacBooks coming out have a working iSight out-of-the-box without needing to do anything, but for older iSights, firmware loading is still required. They changed the firmware loading back to the kernel out of userspace, so all you have to do is get the firmware and place it in the correct location in the filesystem. Let’s do it step by step.

1. First you need to get the firmware out of a particular file located on your OSX install. You can copy it to a USB drive or other location so that you can acess it from Ubuntu. It is located in /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/
AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport
2. Boot into Ubuntu and install isight-firmware-tools

   sudo apt-get install isight-firmware-tools

3. Go ahead and place the AppleUSBSupportVideo file in /lib/firmware

   sudo cp AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/

4. Now, extract the iSight firmware from the file

   sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport

This should place a file called isight.fw in the /lib/firmware directory. It would be a good idea to save a copy of this file somewhere so that you can find it again later and not need to extract it from the AppleUSBVideoSupport file. In the future, you just need to place the isight.fw file in /lib/firmware/.

When all this is done, you need to shutdown your Mac and Start it up again (not reboot!!). Completely shutting down will reinitilize the hardware and allow the firmware to load while starting Ubuntu.

This question gets asked a lot, especially since people are having non-functioning keyboards in Linux Bootloaders (Windows too). If you make room on your Intel Mac to boot Windows and Linux, most distros will now detect windows and add an entry to grub and/or lilo, and install the bootloader to the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your disk. This is ok on most PCs, as there is not normally any other way to choose which OS you want when booting up. However, most Mactel multibooters are using rEFIt to select the OS, and there is no need to use grub for anything but Linux (and hopefully, a EFI native bootloader will be available someday to replace that).

The way to get around this annoyance is to install your Linux bootloader to the root partition (or your /boot partition if you have one), and leave the normal Windows bootloader in the MBR. I use Ubuntu and Grub, and will focus there, but these general instructions should work for any system.

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