Gentoo (and a little Ubuntu) on a MacBook Pro (5,3)

Getting Started

The Google-size summary: I’ve gotten Gentoo working on my MacBook Pro (5,3) again.

I’m going to attempt to recount all the little issues I ran across while installing Gentoo. If you notice I missed something, post it in the comments and I’ll try to figure it out and/or add it here. I also hope to add my findings to the Gentoo wiki, although the wiki is such an outdated mess that I’d almost feel like scratching the whole thing and having the Gentoo+MacBook community write their experiences back in.

Do (Computer) Geeks Really Rule the (Computer) World?

I just read about an interesting development with the latest iPhone. It all started when we found out the iPhone’s antenna is bad. Now we’re finding out AppleCare has informed customers it won’t be fixed (really), Consumer Reports specifically does not recommend the iPhone 4, and Apple forum moderators are deleting threads right and left, which apparently isn’t out of the ordinary, nor will that likely change in the future. (Whew, that was a mouthful!)

If that weren’t enough, Megan McArdle reported about a growing aggravation with Apple’s policies among the geek crowd (surprise, surprise).

Now, what I have to say here is largely speculation. It’s one of those thoughts where you think about it, and it interests you, but you have no real way or need to prove it at the time, but, as time goes on, you start to notice patterns that add leverage to the idea.

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.

Turning to the Grey Side

It’s been a year since my opinion has changed from PC’s to Mac’s, hardware-wise. Now it’s time for my opinions to take physical form. Apple’s keynote presentation at WWDC today has convinced me that now is the best time to buy a MacBook Pro. What are my reasons?