13 ms·

Arch Linux on MacBook Pro Retina 2014

235 points by loicp 12y ago

seyz 12y ago
Nice job. I'm running on Archlinux on a Mac Book Air 2014. The only thing that doesn't work is my webcam. Does yours work?
- ter0 12y ago
  The iSight cameras are now PCIe rather than USB, and no drivers exist for them yet as far as I'm aware. There is some more information on the kernel.org bug tracker[1], and there's also an ongoing attempt to reverse engineer one on GitHub[2]. [1]https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71131 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71131 [2]https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie
  - loicp 12y ago
    Thanks for sharing, I will add a section about the webcam.
- crocowhile 12y ago
  how is battery life and how does it compare to macos?
  - seyz 12y ago
    The battery life is perfect for me. It's hard to compare to macos because I don't use it ^^
- oahziur 12y ago
  How is the stability of wifi?
  - seyz 12y ago
    Everything works very well. The stability is perfect.
Nexxxeh 12y ago
The author asks for language corrections on his documentation. >English is not my native language, corrections and fixes will be greatly appreciated. There's nothing really bad that I could see. No potentially ambiguous instructions at least. Two typos ("Thunderbold" and "actuel"), a missing "to" ("on a second USB") and a spurious "s" ("informations"). What's the best way to provide the feedback? Edit: Looks like submitter is author, so this may be a solved problem.
- loicp 12y ago
  Fixed, thank you for taking the time to report the typos !
  - RexRollman 12y ago
    Also, you have the work "partitionning". I believe that should be "partitioning".
    - loicp 12y ago
      Nice catch, thank you!
    - philtar 12y ago
      Also, you have the word "work". I believe that should be "word".
      - RexRollman 12y ago
        Ahhhh
jkot 12y ago
Nice list, I liked part about powertop. BTW I would like to see similar list howto install OSX on Thinkpad.
bithush 12y ago
Maybe I am just getting old but in 2015 it shouldn't be this much work to get an OS installed on a computer. Getting pretty much any Linux or Windows installed on my ThinkPad is a piece of cake. As pretty as a Bacbook Pro is I just don't have the time for this kind of thing anymore. #GetOffMyLawn ;)
- wampus 12y ago
  Same here. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to come by older machines where installation is a breeze. Most support HD displays and some might even handle 4K. But I'm really grateful for posts like these that document the issues with cutting edge hardware, so they might be resolved by the time I'm pulling the machines of the scrap pile for recycling. Some of my old workhorses had terrible problems with drivers when they were current, but now they Just Work.
- carlosrg 12y ago
  I have Fedora 21 on my MacBook Air and it was just insert the Live USB, click install, reboot and done ;) Arch has always been more complicated, regardless of the computer.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    I have Fedora 20 on my 2009 MacBook Pro and it was a pig to install.
  - fernandotakai 12y ago
    I installed Arch on my mid-2012 mbp and it was quite painless. the only thing that did not work out of the box was wireless, but after installing proprietary drivers, it worked. even multihead worked without issues, which made me quite impressed.
    - omarali 12y ago
      did graphics switching work?
- jmspring 12y ago
darren0 12y ago
After running Linux on MacBooks for the past 5 years I would strongly recommend against it. The basics usually work fine but you are constantly dealing with issues. Each MacBook revision introduces some new issue. For example the webcam recently switched from being usb attached to being attached to the PCI bus and Linux doesn't have drivers yet. Other things like GPU switching, multi monitor, display brightness, all have quirks. Just recently I gave up getting MacBooks to work with Linux and went back to ThinkPads and I couldn't be more happy. Granted you can still buy ThinkPads that have similar issues as the MacBooks. The difference is that you can find a ThinkPad (or some other brand) that works practically flawlessly. With the current line of MacBooks, not a single one doesn't have huge issues (like the webcam).
- progman 12y ago
  Which ThinkPad models work flawlessly for you?
  - peatmoss 12y ago
    Not a high-end machine, but my wife recently got an x140e for peanuts (< $300 for the laptop during the XMas season sales, plus ~$150 to upgrade to an SSD + 8 GB RAM). She was upgrading from a Chromebook and decided that Linux fit her immediate use case better than Windows. My only guidance in this was, "plug in an ethernet cable during installation." Every single piece of hardware--touchpad, sound, webcam, suspend, wifi, etc.--worked out of the box. This machine is solidly built, and reasonably attractive. I'd say the thing that dropped the price was its weight. Functionally, it's easily a replacement for my MacBook Air or better. Physically, it's like three MacBook Airs stacked on top of each other. Sorry, forgot to mention linux distro. She is running stock Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. Unity might get some hate from some segments, but seeing a novice user take to it with zero guidance was illuminating to me.
  - davidy123 12y ago
    I've install Linux (typically Ubuntu) on an x60, x220, t400s, and now t530 and everything (except the fingerprint reader, which I don't care about) worked out of the box. Lenovo even mentions Linux in their material, which means a lot and is worthy of support.
wampus 12y ago
Instead backing up the raw disk with dd, you can create a USB installer in OS X. The trick is to download Yosemite from the App Store and prevent it from running. There are plenty of articles describing the process. If you also have data to preserve, connect an external disk and do a Time Machine backup. If anything goes wrong, you can reinstall OS X from scratch and restore your data (and even restrict the size of your OS X partition so you don't have to resize it again).
floatboth 12y ago
I'd like to install FreeBSD on my MacBook Air. Unfortunately, Broadcom Wi-Fi. Still no driver.
- tbrock 12y ago
  I never understood BSD on laptops. It's like oil and water. The realm of many things BSD is great at does not include power management or hardware support so you will be guaranteed to be unhappy with it.
- suprjami 12y ago
  I have made several Broadcom-equipped laptops more Linux friendly by installing an Intel wifi card. They go for about 20 or 30 bucks on eBay. I don't know if the MBA has replaceable components like that though.
ctrlfreak 12y ago
great lesson. there has to be a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer.
dsqrt 12y ago
I have the same machine as the author of this post and I have been wondering about installing Linux on it for quite some time. I was wondering: wouldn't it be simpler to use virtualization (no problems with the hardware, ease in sharing data between Linux/OS-X no need to partition the disk and so on)? What am I missing?
- loicp 12y ago
  Why not, but which virtualization software to use? I can see the advantages, but what about the drawbacks? Does someone using a virtualized Arch Linux system under Mac OS X is willing to share?
ratsimihah 12y ago
Great post! re "You can leave me a tip for hosting fees, thank you :)": There are 10000 free alternatives to host your blog. Look into Jekyll+Github pages for example.
- loicp 12y ago
  To be more precise, I rent a dedicated server for personal hosting. But to be fair, I have modified this sentence, it's not logical to ask money for something you can find for free. And I'm already convinced by static site generator, because I'm using Hugo.
robbles 12y ago
Totally unrelated to the subject matter, sorry: what is the service that generates the author's picture on the top left? I've been seeing them a lot lately and I don't really understand why people use them in place of a real photo.
- robbles 12y ago
  Looks like it's www.faceyourmanga.com.
  - loicp 12y ago
    I confirm.
tuananh 12y ago
Getting an OS on a laptop shouldn't be this much trouble.
- cmurf 12y ago
  A big part of the complexity is inherent to dual-boot. Dual-booting Macs is a touch more complex than the usual because the firmware is "Apple EFI" not UEFI and not legacy BIOS, and no firmware setup. Next Arch has only recently developed a GUI installer. Several distros have mature GUI installers. So the trouble is partly about the choices made. Even OS X + Windows dual boot quickly gets really complicated if you want to do anything that Apple doesn't directly support in Boot Camp Assistant.
akacase 12y ago
Dell Latitude E4300 with OpenBSD.
cmurf 12y ago
Core Storage volumes can be resized with 'diskutil cs resizevolume' even if they're encrypted. It's not documented in the diskutil man page, and thus probably not supported. I've done this maybe a dozen times and on one of those attempts it totally imploded the file system and couldn't be salvaged - so it works most of the time but a backup is still wise.
shawn-butler 12y ago
I don't think I would trust for very long any system spitting out those ATA errors. The interrupts are also probably the cause of the abnormally high kworker CPU usage.
edcastro 12y ago
Why use powertop instead of tlp? I've been using tlp on my macbook for a few months and everything works smoothly. Good battery life and suspend works perfectly using all tlp related programs (tlp, tlp-sleep, tlp-rdw). :)
- edcastro 12y ago
  Also, forgot to mention, the SATA issues is fixed on Linux 3.18. Or you might want to disable NCQ while you dont upgrade with libata.force=1:noncq http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ide/msg49716.html http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ide/msg49716.html
  - loicp 12y ago
    Thanks, I will add the pointer.
- loicp 12y ago
  Because I wasn't aware of tlp :) Thank you for sharing. By the way I'm very happy by the feedback generated by this thread, thank you guys!
shpx 12y ago
lvcreate --extentes 100%FREE -n root vgcrypt unrecognized option '--extentes' I think you meant '--extents'
- loicp 12y ago
  Fixed, thanks for the report.
insaneirish 12y ago
As an academic exercise, bravo. As a practical matter, articles like this boggle my mind. I really struggle to find a single reason how Linux makes sense on a laptop in 2015 as a primary OS when OS X is an option. If you feel that strongly about running a Linux desktop, just do it in a VM.
- po1nter 12y ago
  * OSX is NOT Linux * OSX is not free * OSX is not Open Source
  - kolinko 12y ago
    "Free" as in FSF? No, but free as in "costless" - yes it is.
  - insaneirish 12y ago
    > * OSX is NOT Linux Is this sportsball? Glad we're picking teams. > * OSX is not free Not really concerned with a Richard Stallman view of the world, nor am I about the semantics of free vs. free. > * OSX is not Open Source Parts of it are. And I fully support the rights of companies to distribute which parts of their own projects that they deem necessary. > * OSX > * OSX > * OSX Actually, it's OS X.
- loicp 12y ago
  If you have any feedback regarding running Arch Linux in a VM under Mac OS X, I would be glad to hear about it, I'm just curious about the drawbacks.
- thejosh 12y ago
  Because OSX workflow is bad? I use a MBA2013, as I'm wanting to work with iOS, and my desktop 99% of the time is Ubuntu with XFCE with works great (I don't use the webcam, and the ethernet doesn't hotplug, but I've used ethernet once in the time I've owned this device). Not everyone likes Mac, Linux or Windows - why can't they just use what they want to use?
  - 12y ago

235 points by loicp 12y ago

seyz 12y ago

Nice job. I'm running on Archlinux on a Mac Book Air 2014. The only thing that doesn't work is my webcam. Does yours work?

ter0 12y ago
The iSight cameras are now PCIe rather than USB, and no drivers exist for them yet as far as I'm aware. There is some more information on the kernel.org bug tracker[1], and there's also an ongoing attempt to reverse engineer one on GitHub[2]. [1]https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71131 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71131 [2]https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie
- loicp 12y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I will add a section about the webcam.
crocowhile 12y ago
how is battery life and how does it compare to macos?
- seyz 12y ago
  The battery life is perfect for me. It's hard to compare to macos because I don't use it ^^
oahziur 12y ago
How is the stability of wifi?
- seyz 12y ago
  Everything works very well. The stability is perfect.

Nexxxeh 12y ago

The author asks for language corrections on his documentation. >English is not my native language, corrections and fixes will be greatly appreciated. There's nothing really bad that I could see. No potentially ambiguous instructions at least. Two typos ("Thunderbold" and "actuel"), a missing "to" ("on a second USB") and a spurious "s" ("informations"). What's the best way to provide the feedback? Edit: Looks like submitter is author, so this may be a solved problem.

loicp 12y ago
Fixed, thank you for taking the time to report the typos !
- RexRollman 12y ago
  Also, you have the work "partitionning". I believe that should be "partitioning".
  - loicp 12y ago
    Nice catch, thank you!
  - philtar 12y ago
    Also, you have the word "work". I believe that should be "word".
    - RexRollman 12y ago
      Ahhhh

jkot 12y ago

Nice list, I liked part about powertop. BTW I would like to see similar list howto install OSX on Thinkpad.

bithush 12y ago

Maybe I am just getting old but in 2015 it shouldn't be this much work to get an OS installed on a computer. Getting pretty much any Linux or Windows installed on my ThinkPad is a piece of cake. As pretty as a Bacbook Pro is I just don't have the time for this kind of thing anymore. #GetOffMyLawn ;)

wampus 12y ago
Same here. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to come by older machines where installation is a breeze. Most support HD displays and some might even handle 4K. But I'm really grateful for posts like these that document the issues with cutting edge hardware, so they might be resolved by the time I'm pulling the machines of the scrap pile for recycling. Some of my old workhorses had terrible problems with drivers when they were current, but now they Just Work.
carlosrg 12y ago
I have Fedora 21 on my MacBook Air and it was just insert the Live USB, click install, reboot and done ;) Arch has always been more complicated, regardless of the computer.
- DanBC 12y ago
  I have Fedora 20 on my 2009 MacBook Pro and it was a pig to install.
- fernandotakai 12y ago
  I installed Arch on my mid-2012 mbp and it was quite painless. the only thing that did not work out of the box was wireless, but after installing proprietary drivers, it worked. even multihead worked without issues, which made me quite impressed.
  - omarali 12y ago
    did graphics switching work?
jmspring 12y ago

darren0 12y ago

After running Linux on MacBooks for the past 5 years I would strongly recommend against it. The basics usually work fine but you are constantly dealing with issues. Each MacBook revision introduces some new issue. For example the webcam recently switched from being usb attached to being attached to the PCI bus and Linux doesn't have drivers yet. Other things like GPU switching, multi monitor, display brightness, all have quirks. Just recently I gave up getting MacBooks to work with Linux and went back to ThinkPads and I couldn't be more happy. Granted you can still buy ThinkPads that have similar issues as the MacBooks. The difference is that you can find a ThinkPad (or some other brand) that works practically flawlessly. With the current line of MacBooks, not a single one doesn't have huge issues (like the webcam).

progman 12y ago
Which ThinkPad models work flawlessly for you?
- peatmoss 12y ago
  Not a high-end machine, but my wife recently got an x140e for peanuts (< $300 for the laptop during the XMas season sales, plus ~$150 to upgrade to an SSD + 8 GB RAM). She was upgrading from a Chromebook and decided that Linux fit her immediate use case better than Windows. My only guidance in this was, "plug in an ethernet cable during installation." Every single piece of hardware--touchpad, sound, webcam, suspend, wifi, etc.--worked out of the box. This machine is solidly built, and reasonably attractive. I'd say the thing that dropped the price was its weight. Functionally, it's easily a replacement for my MacBook Air or better. Physically, it's like three MacBook Airs stacked on top of each other. Sorry, forgot to mention linux distro. She is running stock Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. Unity might get some hate from some segments, but seeing a novice user take to it with zero guidance was illuminating to me.
- davidy123 12y ago
  I've install Linux (typically Ubuntu) on an x60, x220, t400s, and now t530 and everything (except the fingerprint reader, which I don't care about) worked out of the box. Lenovo even mentions Linux in their material, which means a lot and is worthy of support.

wampus 12y ago

Instead backing up the raw disk with dd, you can create a USB installer in OS X. The trick is to download Yosemite from the App Store and prevent it from running. There are plenty of articles describing the process. If you also have data to preserve, connect an external disk and do a Time Machine backup. If anything goes wrong, you can reinstall OS X from scratch and restore your data (and even restrict the size of your OS X partition so you don't have to resize it again).

floatboth 12y ago

I'd like to install FreeBSD on my MacBook Air. Unfortunately, Broadcom Wi-Fi. Still no driver.

tbrock 12y ago
I never understood BSD on laptops. It's like oil and water. The realm of many things BSD is great at does not include power management or hardware support so you will be guaranteed to be unhappy with it.
suprjami 12y ago
I have made several Broadcom-equipped laptops more Linux friendly by installing an Intel wifi card. They go for about 20 or 30 bucks on eBay. I don't know if the MBA has replaceable components like that though.

ctrlfreak 12y ago

great lesson. there has to be a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer.

dsqrt 12y ago

I have the same machine as the author of this post and I have been wondering about installing Linux on it for quite some time. I was wondering: wouldn't it be simpler to use virtualization (no problems with the hardware, ease in sharing data between Linux/OS-X no need to partition the disk and so on)? What am I missing?

loicp 12y ago
Why not, but which virtualization software to use? I can see the advantages, but what about the drawbacks? Does someone using a virtualized Arch Linux system under Mac OS X is willing to share?

ratsimihah 12y ago

Great post! re "You can leave me a tip for hosting fees, thank you :)": There are 10000 free alternatives to host your blog. Look into Jekyll+Github pages for example.

loicp 12y ago
To be more precise, I rent a dedicated server for personal hosting. But to be fair, I have modified this sentence, it's not logical to ask money for something you can find for free. And I'm already convinced by static site generator, because I'm using Hugo.

robbles 12y ago

Totally unrelated to the subject matter, sorry: what is the service that generates the author's picture on the top left? I've been seeing them a lot lately and I don't really understand why people use them in place of a real photo.

robbles 12y ago
Looks like it's www.faceyourmanga.com.
- loicp 12y ago
  I confirm.

tuananh 12y ago

Getting an OS on a laptop shouldn't be this much trouble.

cmurf 12y ago
A big part of the complexity is inherent to dual-boot. Dual-booting Macs is a touch more complex than the usual because the firmware is "Apple EFI" not UEFI and not legacy BIOS, and no firmware setup. Next Arch has only recently developed a GUI installer. Several distros have mature GUI installers. So the trouble is partly about the choices made. Even OS X + Windows dual boot quickly gets really complicated if you want to do anything that Apple doesn't directly support in Boot Camp Assistant.

akacase 12y ago

Dell Latitude E4300 with OpenBSD.

cmurf 12y ago

Core Storage volumes can be resized with 'diskutil cs resizevolume' even if they're encrypted. It's not documented in the diskutil man page, and thus probably not supported. I've done this maybe a dozen times and on one of those attempts it totally imploded the file system and couldn't be salvaged - so it works most of the time but a backup is still wise.

shawn-butler 12y ago

I don't think I would trust for very long any system spitting out those ATA errors. The interrupts are also probably the cause of the abnormally high kworker CPU usage.

edcastro 12y ago

Why use powertop instead of tlp? I've been using tlp on my macbook for a few months and everything works smoothly. Good battery life and suspend works perfectly using all tlp related programs (tlp, tlp-sleep, tlp-rdw). :)

edcastro 12y ago
Also, forgot to mention, the SATA issues is fixed on Linux 3.18. Or you might want to disable NCQ while you dont upgrade with libata.force=1:noncq http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ide/msg49716.html http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ide/msg49716.html
- loicp 12y ago
  Thanks, I will add the pointer.
loicp 12y ago
Because I wasn't aware of tlp :) Thank you for sharing. By the way I'm very happy by the feedback generated by this thread, thank you guys!

shpx 12y ago

lvcreate --extentes 100%FREE -n root vgcrypt unrecognized option '--extentes' I think you meant '--extents'

loicp 12y ago
Fixed, thanks for the report.

insaneirish 12y ago

As an academic exercise, bravo. As a practical matter, articles like this boggle my mind. I really struggle to find a single reason how Linux makes sense on a laptop in 2015 as a primary OS when OS X is an option. If you feel that strongly about running a Linux desktop, just do it in a VM.

po1nter 12y ago
* OSX is NOT Linux * OSX is not free * OSX is not Open Source
- kolinko 12y ago
  "Free" as in FSF? No, but free as in "costless" - yes it is.
- insaneirish 12y ago
  > * OSX is NOT Linux Is this sportsball? Glad we're picking teams. > * OSX is not free Not really concerned with a Richard Stallman view of the world, nor am I about the semantics of free vs. free. > * OSX is not Open Source Parts of it are. And I fully support the rights of companies to distribute which parts of their own projects that they deem necessary. > * OSX > * OSX > * OSX Actually, it's OS X.
loicp 12y ago
If you have any feedback regarding running Arch Linux in a VM under Mac OS X, I would be glad to hear about it, I'm just curious about the drawbacks.
thejosh 12y ago
Because OSX workflow is bad? I use a MBA2013, as I'm wanting to work with iOS, and my desktop 99% of the time is Ubuntu with XFCE with works great (I don't use the webcam, and the ethernet doesn't hotplug, but I've used ethernet once in the time I've owned this device). Not everyone likes Mac, Linux or Windows - why can't they just use what they want to use?
- 12y ago