Linux and Apple: Getting Them to Play Nice

The Quick Stuff

For all you "I hate reading" readers, here are the highlights:

• Ubuntu and Apple: Just click on one of the links to get to your particular Mac, and you'll be fine.
• Fedora and Apple: If it's new, it's broken.

The Actual Post

To borrow the style of Top Gear announcing one of their letters, I have been inundated with literally three hits concerning Linux and some piece of Apple hardware (thank you Google Analytics). Well, seeing as it was pretty darn frustrating trying to get my penguins to eat fruit for the longest time, I figured I'd help out the Internet to do just that. Let's just hope Google picks up on this post, eh?
To begin, let's start with the latest OS I've played with:

Things to Do Before Installing Linux

Download and install REFIT, it just makes things easier

Fedora 11 - "Leonidas"

I'll spare the 300 jokes and move right on into getting this working on your Apple.

Hardware Compatibility Issues

Not every Apple is equal, and as is especially the case with Linux, some Apples are much more equal than others. To keep things simple, let's assume that we're only dealing with Intel-based Macs, and that I'll be lumping Macs together based upon their chipset (more or less).

Good-to-Go

If you're using a Mac with an Intel Core Duo or Core Solo, you're A-OK.

If you're using a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo with an Intel-based chipset, you're A-OK.

Not So Good-to-Go

If you're using a fairly new Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo and an NVIDIA chipset, you're going to have lots of problems.

If you've got a fairly new Mac with a MultiTouch trackpad (with no discrete button), it won't work under Fedora without modified drivers (and even then, it's a bit weird).

Things to Do After Installation

Synchronize the MBR with the EFI partition tables, by selecting the "Partition Tool" underneath the OS icons. Doing this will get rid of the "OS not found" message.

Get some new repositories:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm'

And some better software:

su -c 'yum -y update && yum -y install vlc gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras gstreamer-ffmpeg libdvdcss nautilus-open-terminal ccsm'

Don't forget about the flash plugin:

# For 32-bit users:
su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm && yum -y install flash-plugin'

# For 64-bit users:
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz && tar xfa libflashplayer* && cp *.so /usr/local/lib64/mozilla/plugins/'

Ubuntu 9.04 - "Jaunty Jackelope"

Jaunty just sounds terrible, despite being rather appropriate.

Hardware Compatability Issues

Even with Ubuntu's legendary driver support, some things just end up acting a bit weird. Here's what I've noticed:

Not so Good-to-Go

The newer NVIDIA chipset-based Macs have issues dealing with ACPI functionality, in the form of being unable to cleanly reboot. This means you'll be shutting down before booting up. Not a big deal, but kind of annoying along the way.

You'll need patched audio drivers (available on the top-most Ubuntu link, as per your hardware), as there aren't good ones out there just yet.

Things to Do After Installation

Get some better software:

Now, pay attention to these updates, as it asks you to accept the Sun Java license agreement, and waits there until you do (this isn't a walk-away installation).

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras openssh-server vim-full nautilus-open-terminal bum

Any thoughts or comments?