Installing Debian on Macbook Pro 7,1


Installing Debian on my Macbook Pro 7,1 was a rocky road, so I thought I'd sare some of the details how I got it all working.

After some fiddling, I got the installer running ... ...and some hours later, I got Debian up and running

Part of the difficulty of installing Debian on my Macbook Pro (in January 2010) is that the various documentation, wiki pages, mailing list posts and blog entries available online is very sketchy, contradicting and to a great degree outdated. For instance, I was very confused as what to do about booting & partioning. Do I need Bootcamp? What about rEFIt? Do I have to use the rather ancient LILO instead of Grub? And so on.

Partitioning

I simply used the default partition tool installed on my Mac. Shrunk the Mac partition and added a second one of type FAT.

Later, when I was in the Debian installer, I re-formatted this partition as EXT3 (I tried EXT4 first, but this failed for some reason). I didn't set up a swap partition as I don't believe I need it with 4GB RAM. If needs be, I'll set up a swap file (not a partition) later on.

Installing new boot loader

I installed the rEFIt Mac package, which both provided me with a boot loader which detects various OSes, allows you to boot them (including Linux) and syncs between the Mac specific partition table and the "real" partition table. This tool, accessible from the boot menu, is necessary to run after you install Debian (or Linux in general).

Do I need Bootcamp?

I've read about that you need to use Bootcamp, I don't believe this to be true. The only thing I used it for, was basically to launch the "Windows installer", which I believe to be the same as restarting your computer and pressing the c key to boot from the CD drive.

Use a modified version of the Debian Lenny installer

I tried the latest (2011-01-07) builds of the Debian Squeeze and none of them managed to find the CDROM drive (even though the installer was launched from it!).

Using this version of the Lenny installer from iwamatsu, the installer worked perfectly (except for failing to use EXT4, forcing me to use EXT3 instead).

One thing you must be careful to do, is to install GRUB to your Linux partition and not to the device's MBR. This is very important, or else, you might not be able to boot the rEFIt loader when you start the computer. The idea is that you first boot rEFIt and when selecting Linux, rEFIt will call the GRUB boot loader located on the Linux partition.

Wireless

02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322
802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)

To get wireless working, I had to manually compile thewl driver as well as black listing theb43 and ssb kernel modules.

It's important that you first unload theb43 andssb driver before you attempt to load thewl driver, as the latter will not work properly (although it will load) if the other drivers are present. To do this manually, do:

# rmmod ssb
# rmmod b43
# modprobe lib80211_crypt_tkip
# modprobe wl

Once this is working properly for you, you can make this persistent with:

# echo lib80211_crypt_tkip >> /etc/modules
# echo wl >> /etc/modules
# echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
# echo "blacklsit ssb" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Keyboard summarsaults

Since the Mac keyboard is different (some will say inferiour to that of a normal PC keyboard), I had to make some modifications to my keymap as well as learning a few new tricks.

Chaning around some vital keys

I got back the keyboard comfort by creating this ```.xmodmaprc```: I load it by putting this in my```.fluxbox/startup``` file: xmodmap "$HOME/.xmodmaprc" ### Where is the insert key? I use the insert key all the time for pasting text (```shfit + insert```), to get the insert key press on the Mac keyboard, I had to do```fn + enter```, normal X paste then became```fn + shift + enter``` ## That icy touchpad The touch pad is really nice (although I would wish for a track point instead), but requires some fiddling to get working properly. ### How do I right click? The touch pad left somethings to be learned. To right click, I tap (click) with two fingers. ### Multi touch To get multitouch to work, I installed the following packages from the Debian testing repository: # apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-multitouch libmtdev1 As well as the kernel module specific for this touch pad. Add the Mactel repository to your```/etc/apt/sources.list``` and: # apt-get install bcm5974-dkms This will also install the HID package you need.

Important, do not install the ``` xf86-input-multitouch``` from the above Ubuntu Mactel repostiroy as it's binary incompatible with the X server installed from the Debian repository, since they've been compiled against differnet versions of the X server.
I added the following snippet to my```org.conf``` Section "InputClass" MatchIsTouchpad "true" Identifier "Multitouch Touchpad" Driver "multitouch" EndSection ## Shiny graphics Currently, I couldn't get X working properly with the open source alternatives for nVIDIA, hence I needed the properiatary driver: # apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-dkms \ nvidia-kernel-source nvidia-settings nvidia-xconfig ## Screen Brightnes I had the problem that after waking up from its sleep (suspend to RAM), the brightness was dimmed down if the laptop wasn't plugged in. Even after plugging it in, it was not possible to get the brightness up. This problem did not occur when doing a normal, cold boot of the Mac. The solution was to install guillaumezin's nvidiabl kernel driver. I installed it from source and SUIDed the executable and set myself to the group owner of the brighness device. It's probably more "correct" to hook onto the APCI event structure in```/etc/acpi```, but I just wanted it to work now so that I could continue my work. First off, this meant: $ cd /usr/local/src $ git clone https://github.com/guillaumezin/nvidiabl.git $ cd nvidiabl $ make $ su - # make install # cp srcipts/etc/* /etc/ # cp srcipts/usr/local/sbin/* /usr/local/sbin I then made it possible for the```torstein``` user to set the brightness without the way of ACPI events: # chgrp torstein /sys/class/backlight/nvidia_backlight/brightness # chmod g+w /sys/class/backlight/nvidia_backlight/brightness # chmod 755 /usr/local/sbin/nvidiablctl Lastly, I bound the key events of the brightness keys to the nvidiablctl script using my window manager's configuration. Since I'm using fluxbox, this meant adding the following lines to```~/.fluxbox/keys```: # Brightness XF86MonBrightnessDown :ExecCommand /usr/local/sbin/nvidiablctl down XF86MonBrightnessUp :ExecCommand /usr/local/sbin/nvidiablctl up ## Microphone I had problems getting the microphone to work in Skype and Google Video (even though it worked in```gnome-sound-recorder```). Simply installing```pulseaudio``` made it work in Skype too. $ lspci | grep audio 00:08.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP89 High Definition Audio (rev a2) $ dpkg -l pulseaudio | grep ^ii ii pulseaudio 0.9.21-3+squeeze1 PulseAudio sound server ### Let go of my sound card! Sometimes, I've had the problem that some process have "stolen" my sound card. This is especially a problem when I want to talk on Skype or Google Talk (voice/video). Hence, when I don't get any sound or microphone working, I run this wee script to make the other applications "let go" of my sound card: #! /usr/bin/env bash lsof +d /dev/snd/ | \ grep -v pulse | \ grep -v COMM | \ cut -d' ' -f5 | \ xargs kill -9 ## Working on the same files Since I'm working on the same files on Linux from Mac OS X and wise verca, I have changed the UID of the Linux user to match that of the Mac user. # /etc/passwd torstein:x:502:1000:Torstein Krause Johansen,,,:/home/torstein:/bin/bash Debian asisgned user ID```1000``` to my ```torstein``` user, whereas Mac OS assigned ID```502``` to its ```torstein``` user. For the permissions and everything to look right when visiting the same files from either operating system, I changed the UID of my user in Debian, as shown above. ## On the Mac OS X side of things Added this to my```.bashrc``` which again is called each time I open a new terminal. This is something you must configure for the Terminal application, per default it doesn't source```.bashrc``` if [ $(df | grep debian | wc -l) -lt 1 ]; then sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk0s3 /mnt/debian/ -o force,rw fi

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