MacBook Pro Revision 3,1 Ubuntu Hardy Heron Issues ★
I finally gathered the courage to install Ubuntu 8.04 on my MacBook Pro as I’ve been having quite a taste of it’s beta through VMware Fusion. I am really pleased with this distribution after having installed it and fixing quite a few trivial issues by looking at a hundred websites.
I had installed Linux on my regular desktop almost a year back and had stopped using it when the WG311 wireless card failed to work. But I had seen that the MacBook Pro hardware was perfectly compatible with Ubuntu with a minor tweaks in configuration.
So I first installed the refit EFI Boot Loader, grabbed it from sourceforge.
Then I downloaded the x64 Ubuntu disk and copied the disk image on a temporary partition on my hard disk. Booting from the temporary partition I installed Ubuntu. After that I had a working copy of Ubuntu with everything but the 8600M GT graphic card and Atheros 5424(recognised in Linux as 5418) functioning well. Both these devices had the drivers missing, so that was only a minor issue.
I downloaded the recommended revision 3403 of MadWiFi from http://madwifi.org and tried to install it, but it failed because I had not installed the build-essential package.
I used:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
which by default tries to grab the build-essential package from the ubuntu website, but for some unknown reason it just isn’t present right now. So after a little meddling around I used the following commands:
sudo apt-cdrom add
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
After that everything went like a breeze.
To get the wireless working I downloaded and extracted madwifi r3403 from subversion into a temporary folder and from there executed:
make
sudo make install
sudo sed -i~ ’s/^exit 0/modprobe ath_pci\nexit 0/’ /etc/rc.local
sudo sed -i~ ’s/^exit 0/modprobe wlan_scan_sta\nexit 0/’ /etc/rc.local
sudo sed -i~ ’s/^exit 0/iwpriv ath0 bgscan 0\nexit 0/’ /etc/rc.local
That done, restart your computer, select your network and enjoy browsing.
Just select System -> Preferences -> Appearance - Desktop Effects. Try enabling them and you will automatically be prompted to install the graphic card drivers from the internet. Download, install and restart to have a really aesthetically pleasing desktop. It’s the next best thing to OS X.
Of course, you need to make changes in the etc\x11 folder to get your trackpad gestures working but that isn’t going to be much of a problem if you follow the guide at help.ubuntu.com. I would like to point out that the MBP 3,1 doesn’t use the Broadcom chipset like the guide tries to tell us. On looking at the system profiler, I saw that it is an Atheros 5324 chipset.
See, I told you that you would love Ubuntu. And why do you call it the next best thing to OSX? It lacks nothing but Time Machine… the rest of the effects are much better. Install some more Compiz Fusion plugins… and admire the customizability…
Next best thing to OS X. That depends on perspectives. Linux is definitely better than Windows in terms of the general desktop experience since it feels a lot like OS X. At least the Gnome part of it.
There are somethings I just can’t explain. OS X just feels a lot better. The way everything is rendered. How applications work seamlessly. Quick Look, and yeah the general feel of an application.
Maybe because Linux is aimed at such a large audience, it fails to please me. But instead I would really love it if these distributions did indeed support specific hardware. Maybe in the form of releases that are updated only everytime 3 regular releases are updated or something.
Another thing is application stability and snappiness. That isn’t really there with all the office apps. All these complaints maybe just because of my hardware but I do consider my hardware recent enough to support everything.
I’ve decided to keep Ubuntu as my primary OS for a while as I really want to get a little cozy with Linux and Solaris.
It’s nice to use Midori. A little unstable, still a lot nicer than emulating Safari.
OpenOffice.org is a slow application. Period. It is slow in everything… whether on Windows, Linux or even Mac. Don’t you notice that OSX’s UI is not themeable at all when compared to a GNOME desktop? Superficially, your GNOME desktop can look like anything you can imagine. But then in OSX, the most customized desktop I have seen is a different wallpaper or another icon set. That is a lot like Microsuck’s Windows I guess… no matter what you do, it basically looks the same!
And try this thing called the “Avant Window Navigator’… and a few OS X themes. You won’t miss your Apple machine anymore.
You can make it look like it but you can’t make it feel like it. I will never miss any operating system since I can get my day to day work done even on Windows 95. But do I want that?
Actually OS X grows on you. It becomes you. Long time Mac users like standard colour schemes throughout the operating system. And if you want to theme it, you really can with third party apps. But I choose not to.
I’m only saying that the Android is not going to have an interface as fluid as the iPhone ever. Because it is built for phones in general. The iPhone OS is built for specific hardware.
You can never experience the full OS X on hardware that’s not identical to what it’s built for. I’m not just talking about the configuration but also the changes Apple makes to it’s hardware to render similar hardware incompatible.
When I initially bought the MacBook Pro it was so that I could use OS X like it should be used. I can run any other operating system side by side normally. But OS X was the main thing I was looking at. It’s just beautiful. I don’t miss the terminal at all. OS X has all the terminal functions Linux has and maybe more but the GUI is what Mac users love.
Go and read the reviews of Mac OS X (Panther, Tiger and Leopard) on ArsTechnica. That will give you a good idea as to Apple’s devotion to make a perfect GUI. And like always perfection isn’t enough.
MacBook Pro Revision 3,1 Ubuntu Hardy Heron Issues - Ubuntu 8 Macbook Pro 2008 ♦ Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro News…
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