Fedora on Mactel
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WARNING: This is a technology preview
The following describes a basic set of steps to get Fedora going on Intel-based Apple hardware. Note that this is pretty early stuff and may eat babies but seems to work for the basics of installation. Be sure to have backups of anything that's "important" as it's pretty easy to end up in situations where you have to reinstall OS/X. All of this should be in Fedora Core 6 Test 1. Various bits are in the development tree as of June 11th, but bug fixes are ongoing.
As for how well things work, I would say that the Minis work reasonably well. The main thing which won't work there is the wireless as it uses an Atheros chipset. The Macbooks have both wireless which won't work out of the box (Atheros) however there are drivers available from third parties. Also, the newer Radeon hardware won't work for which there isn't an open driver (X1600).
Right now, we've only tested Dual Booting with OS/X. If you want to Triple Boot, you're going to have to do some investigation on your own.
First off, install the OS/X 10.4.6 update and any applicable firmware updates for your system. Then, download and install BootCamp. BootCamp basically just lets you do online resizing of the HFS+ partition -- most of the magic here is actually in the firmware updates. Run the Boot Camp Assistant to resize your OS/X partition. Then, put in your Fedora CD and reboot to CD either by using the startup choice or holding down C at boot-time.
Then, you're to a pretty normal Fedora install. Autopartitioning will do the right thing with the BootCamp created partition and grub will default to being installed on the /boot partition rather than the MBR (installation to the MBR will cause your machine to be unable to boot)
Once you've successfully installed, reboot and hold down the Alt/Option key to get the boot camp "menu" and you can select "Windows" for your Linux install. Don't press keys at grub or you run a high chance of the machine locking up. If you want to have a better boot menu or default to Linux instead of OS/X, I'd suggest looking into rEFIt
After install, change driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf from 'i810' to 'intel' if it isn't already intel. The 'intel' version of the driver does automatic mode setting.
Future TODO items
Make libparted handle the gpt -> MBR syncing instead of running gptsync in anaconda
Fix the grub lockup (Fixed in 20060613 tree by pjones)
- Maybe investigate trying to do something like rEFIt installation from Linux (???)
- Bluetooth keyboard/mouse stops working when bluetooth services are started. Workaround: Press 'I' for interactive boot, do not start the bluetooth services. When properly booted, use chkconfig to disable bluetooth services. This needs some reasearch, but I need a USB keyboard to research this.
- rEFit can't boot Linux after running the interactive EFI shell? Check if this is reproducible.
Surviving with a one-button mouse
Even if your Apple computer was shipped with a one-button mice you can survive in GNOME by emulating right-click.
To emulate right-click with the keyboard, you must bind a key on the keyboard to the mouse button you want and enable an accessibility feature called mouse keys:
- Choose System, Preferences, Accessibility, Keyboard
- Check "Enable keyboard accessibility features"
- Choose "Mouse Keys", check "Enable Mouse Keys"
This also has some side effects as to how the keypad behaves.
I like the "Enter" key on my keyboard as the third mouse button, here's how I did it:
- Start gnome-terminal
- Run xev, it will display the X11 events it picks up
- Locate the keycode of the key you want to use:
Press the key you want locate and locate the KeyPress event in gnome-terminal
Write down the keycode of the keyevent
Run xmodmap -e "keycode 108 = Pointer_Button3" to update your keyboard map (for this login session only)