Status of Gentoo on MacBook Pro (5,3)

HEY, LISTEN! This blog post and some of its tips are out-dated. You can read it but keep that in mind. I have a more detailed HOWTO-like blog post here.

• ALSA: It supports all the inputs and outputs on the computer. The headphones and speakers get two different volume levels. I find setting headphones to 30% and speakers to 100% works perfectly for me, but every pair of headphones acts differently.
• Graphics: NVIDIA drivers have been available from the start. No fuss or mess here, especially now that distributions have seemed to have finally found a way to package them in a way that doesn’t obliterate important X11 libraries.
• Screen and keyboard brightness work if you install pommed. Since GNOME already recognizes the volume keys, I turned that off in pommed. The Banshee music player (my new favorite) understands the media controls, to my surprise! The eject button is also supported by pommed. As far as standard keyboard buttons go, the Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, Windows, Delete, and Function keys are all accessible via the Fn key, in combination with the left, right, up, down, Command, “delete”/Backspace, and Function keys respectively. (Why OSX doesn’t understand half these keys, and some of them only half the time, I still don’t understand.)
• The large trackpad works very well. Single-finger click is a left click, two-finger click is a right click, and three-finger click is a middle click. Two-finger scrolling works very well, and can even be turned on and off in the Mouse settings in GNOME. Four-finger scrolling appears to be interpreted as a single finger, but that may be adjustable.
• Within the last week or so, a new release of the isight-firmware-tools package (1.5.92) just added support for the iSight camera built into this MacBook. I am very happy about that, since that’s one less thing to reboot into OSX for. It still has some small setup required, but it’s a one-liner, so it barely registers on my “todo” list.
• The wireless card works very well, and works with NetworkManager. Bluetooth works.
• The battery is reported correctly in GNOME.
• The SD card slot works. I’ve used it several times.
• The fans require some doing. They don’t actually turn on automatically (scarily enough), so I had to hack up a script someone wrote to get the fan to react to temperatures reported by sysfs.
• And the hard-drive, um, spins and stuff.

So, as you can see, besides pommed, a fan script, and the webcam, there’s really very little tweaking required. Everything more or less works.

Edit: The kernel configuration for this machine was requested in the comments below, so I’ve posted it here.

Mozilla Weave

This is a short blog post to say that I’ve found an excellent must-have for Firefox users. It’s called Mozilla Weave. It keeps history, bookmarks, passwords, Firefox settings, and soon add-ons in sync. My experience of any kind of automated syncing software has been poor, but this one seems to be flawless. Minus connectivity issues when I’m offline, it’s never reported an error or bugged me about some conflict or other. It just sits there and uploads data to Weave servers (or your own if you so choose) so other computers may stay in sync. Even if you don’t have multiple computers, this is great for just backing up, especially considering the Firefox data folder is a pain to back up.

Privacy concerns are non-existent here, because everything is encrypted with a pass-phrase, on top of your Weave account username and password.

The only bummer about Weave is it’s limited to just Firefox, and Firefox’s competitors have no equivalent yet. It looks like I won’t be switching to Chrome any time soon.