It’s been a very long time since I posted anything, so it’s my new year’s resolution to do more this year. This first post of the year will be a computer post. Over the holidays I picked up a MacBook Air, and I have to say I love the design. Some of the highlights include: back-lit keyboard, multi-touch trackpad, fans & speakers hidden in the joint between the display and the keyboard & aluminium case. Apple really does a great job with design. But of course, I hate the simplicity of MacOSX. Yes I know it’s built on top of Darwin, but I like to be able to tinker with “everything” and run all my favorite programs. So the first thing to do when I got it was to delete everything and put on Linux. I won’t go through every detail, but I will mention the things that did not work out of the box. Hope this helps someone else!

##################################
# MacOSX fixes – Do this before
# removing MacOSX
##################################

If you use only Linux, boot hangs for 30 seconds waiting for the Mac partition. To override this issue the following command (from MacOSX):
bless –device /dev/disk0s1 –setBoot –legacy –verbose

To stop the boot mac sound, issue the following command:
/usr/sbin/nvram SystemAudioVolume=%01

##################################
# Wireless Card
# note the two <M>, these MUST be
# built as modules for the wifi
# card to work
##################################

edit: in kernel 3.2+ you must turn off BCMA to get BRCM softmac enabled, which is now under drivers/network (not staging)

 

Install: sys-kernel/linux-firmware

[*] Networking support —>
-*- Wireless —>
<*> cfg80211 – wireless configuration API
[*] Wireless extensions sysfs files
<*> Common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers
<*> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)

Device Drivers —>
Broadcom specific AMBA —>
<M> BCMA support
[*] Support for BCMA on PCI-host bus
[*] Staging drivers —>
<M> Broadcom IEEE802.11n PCIe SoftMAC WLAN driver

##################################
# Intel Video Card
##################################

edit: the hack below is not needed in kernels newer than 3.2

I found this solution here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39533#c25

first edit /usr/src/linux/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_bios.c
and after the:
DRM_DEBUG_KMS(“Found panel mode in BIOS VBT tables:\n”);
drm_mode_debug_printmodeline(panel_fixed_mode);
lines add the following:
panel_fixed_mode->hdisplay = 1366;
panel_fixed_mode->hsync_start = 1398;
panel_fixed_mode->hsync_end = 1566;
panel_fixed_mode->htotal = 1734;
panel_fixed_mode->vdisplay = 768;
panel_fixed_mode->vsync_start = 772;
panel_fixed_mode->vsync_end = 776;
panel_fixed_mode->vtotal = 792;
panel_fixed_mode->clock = 72500;
panel_fixed_mode->type = 0×48;
panel_fixed_mode->flags = 0xa;
drm_mode_set_name(panel_fixed_mode);

Graphics support —>
<*> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support) —>
<*> Intel 8xx/9xx/G3x/G4x/HD Graphics
[*] Enable modesetting on intel by default

##################################
# Intel Audio Card
##################################

This worked automatically with pulseaudio, BUT I had to install gnome-alsamixer and turn up the “Surround” volume to get the speakers working

##################################
# Webcam
##################################

install the media-video/isight-firmware-tools
download: http://www.mediafire.com/?81xtkqyttjt

then ift-extract –apple-driver AppleUSBVideoSupport

##################################
# SSD enhancements
##################################

fstab should include (in this case sda1 is the ssd, the tmpfs is for gentoo to not compile on the ssd):
/dev/sda1 / ext4 discard,noatime,data=ordered 0 1
tmpfs /var/tmp/portage tmpfs nodev,nosuid,mode=1777 0 0

add the following to the /boot/grub/grub.conf kernel line:
elevator=noop