Setting up Ubuntu 12.10 on a Macbook Pro
With Mountain Lion really not living up to any form of the expectation a new OSX release has, infact making my MBP run slower i was interested to see what the Mac specific 64bit build of UBuntu 12.10 has to offer this long time Ubuntu user. While the inital install wasn’t without its gripes i’ve stuck with it and documented how I got on.
Update: If Ubuntu isn’t all you need it to be follow this link to find out about Sabayon on the Macbook Pro
http://blog.projectz.me/2013/02/17/sabayon-linux-11-on-a-macbook-pro/
Previous installs of Ubuntu on this mac have involved what is basically a respin of the alternative install, a lot of mucking about with Disk partitions and a lot of install pain. Not this time. I downloaded the Mac specific download and booted it off a CD. The Unity booted up and i was asked if i wanted to install or try, i gave it a bit of a run through and then ran the stock Ubuntu Installer with no issues at all. After the reboot once the install had finished I waited for a few seconds for the EFI boot to pass and Ubuntu booted up and I was able to login.
During the install i Encrypted the drive because I could and I like to think I have a little extra security on there should i forget the device anywhere, this all worked fine, and yet again each version of Ubuntu provides me with a cleaner and more user friendly experience..
Installing the NVidia Drivers
I like to run the NVidia drivers, nothing wrong with the stock Ubuntu display drivers, however I don’t stick to that everything must be opensource clap trap, I want the best experience I can get from my desktop.. On previous versions of Ubuntu you would power up Additional Hardware Drivers (Jockey-gtk) and drivers would be installed, for some reason this is now found not as a standalone app but under the sources dialog as its own tab. Not the most intuative place to put it.
It did offer me the tested, experimental and waaaaay out there use at your own risk bleading edge drivers for Nvidia which my MBP has, so I went for the nvidia-current and installed that and the Broadcom Wifi Drivers because the wifi wasn’t working the install provided me with a bar showing just how long i had left to wait then I was told i could reboot.
Rebooting however gave me a problem as when I logged back in the wallpaper displayed but no Unity…
Fixing the login issue
Turns out there may be a bug in the NVidia install DEB’s on 12.10 which calls
linux-headers-generic but doesn’t install them, so while the package tries to install it actually fails. To get round this you need o do the following from the command line:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
Once the headers have installed, you need to reconfigure the Nvidia drivers which will depend on which one you chose when you installed them.
This if you have nvidia-current (proprietary,tested)
Code:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-current
This if you have nvidia-current-updates (proprietary)
Code:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-current-updates
This if you have nvidia-experimental-304 (proprietary)
Code:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-experimental-304
A reboot will then resolve this login issue and display Unity
Getting Wifi to work
The last major system to get working would be the Wifi and for me that was done by installing the following from the command line
Code:
sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-common b43-fwcutter
Then rebooting, what was also interesting was the Avahi Daemon also automatically sorted out the .local extention on my home OSX domain for me, a known problem with previous versions of Ubuntu
Odds and Sods
Having got the video fixed and wifi working, and this being a MBP I needed to get a few other things working which are the reason I still keeep the device going, so i’ll share those as well
Ubuntu and the iPad
I’d like to be able to mount my iPad 3 on Ubuntu and get the photos off it some time, Apple have actually done a really good job at making the device software not require to be connected to a PC since IOS5 occasionally however it is needed.
Code:
sudo apt-get install libimobiledevice-utils ifuse
Then connect the iPAd and run
Code:
idevicepair unpair && idevicepair pair
Google Drive
With no Google Drive client for Ubuntu in sight leave it to the community to create the software the big boys are scared to and InSync is just that an Ubuntu Google Drive Client.
Go over here and download a copy of Insync using your web browser. Or open terminal and run the commands below to download.
wget http://s.insynchq.com/builds/insync-linux-beta1-py27.tar.bz2
Next, run the commands below to extract the file
tar xjf insync-linux-beta1-py27.tar.bz2
After that, run this command to perform the second extraction.
tar xvf insync-linux-metapackage.tar
Finally, run the commands below to install insync. Follow the on screen prompts (accept all when prompted).
sudo ./insync-installer
After installing, go to Startup Applications
Then click ‘Add’ to add new program. Next, type the name, command to automatically start insync and click ‘Save’
Log Out or Restart your computer and insync should launch and allow you to configure it.
Right-clicking in Nautilus will give you the option to share.
The command to start insync from the command line is insync
Spotify
As a Spotify rather than an iTunes user due to my cross platform addiction getting Spotify onto Ubuntu is also a lot easier
run the commands below to add Spotify’s repository key.
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 4E9CFF4E
Next, copy and paste the line below to add Spotify’s repository.
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
Finally, run the commands below to install Spotify.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install spotify-client-qt
Conclusion
The install and disk partitioning issues i’ve had previously with this ISO are no longer however a bug in the NVidia package did make this a bit of a beast to get going, however now I’m installed on the MBP its a lot quicker even than a fresh install of Mountain Lion.. Unity works well and I’m a Happy Linux User Again..
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Useful article! But, excuse me, what is this “mac specific” ubuntu download?
Thanks
I’m guessing google is broken at your end then?
Head over to http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10
You will see a 64 bit mac specific build, it’s tailored to some hardware requirements for macs,, efi as well
I have a 700MB blank CD but it seems that isn’t big enough
and I haven’t had good luck getting the amd64+mac.iso file to a usb stick from OSX, like I usually do. The farthest I made it was to a a Grub2 Prompt, and that was by creating a USB stick using the non-mac amd64 ISO.
Why not burn on to a DVD? I use unetbootin to get the iOS onto a USB stick, but I agree I have only ever got this working from a windows PC, otherwise Ubuntu does have a tool built in to get iso files on to a USB stick.
This didn’t work for me on an imac, using a livecd and the mac specific ubutunu 12.10…. It doesn’t seem like the efi bootloader has been installed as linux is visible in the mac alt boot selection menu.
Sorry I don’t understand.. What didn’t work? Did the cd boot? Did Ubuntu install? Can you not boot into Ubuntu post reboot? Are you trying to dual boot OSX and Ubuntu? If you can elaborate maybe we can learn what isn’t working and see if we can help?
Great post. For some reason i can’t get wireless to work. I followed your instructions as well as from here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro8-2/Oneiric#Wireless and all to no avail.
What MAc do you have? if you run a the lspci command from the command line does the network card display, and if so what does it show, that might help me assist you.
MacBookPro8,2 / Ubuntu 12.10 x64
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4331 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 02)
Thank you
Wow, you’re not wrong there seem to be issues with that Wifi card, the page http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1848858 has links for compiling the module yourself if our up for it. While not perfect, the instructions at http://homepage.uibk.ac.at/~c705283/archives/2011/09/04/linux_support_for_broadcom_4331_wireless_chip_macbook_pro_81/index.html have been confirmed to work.
This page also looks VERY positive.. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1966236
Let me know if we need to search a bit more..
is that a retina mac?
Shouldn’t the line “sudo apt-get install linux-headers-general” be “sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic” ? Because the linux-headers-general package was not found when I tried this.
You are of course correct, apologies I. Have amended the post. Many thanks for letting me know and may autocorrect rot in hell
Thanks for this post, one difference I had was when I installed linux-headers-generic it was getting newer headers than what I needed. So I had to do uname -r which spits out 3.5.0-17-generic, then had to install linux-headers-3.5.0-17-generic.
did your mac run extremely hot? mine is simply burning up and the battery runs out in 2 hours from a full charge. great article though.
Yeah, battery life does get caned somewhat. I used Powertop
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1924960
This sorted it out from running hot, then this guide has some great tips..
http://mac.linux.be/content/improve-battery-life-macbook-ubuntu
Dear Projectzme,
I’m a computer engineering student that’s really anxious to get rid of OS X and use linux as the main OS.
But has a student i need 4 ~ 5 hours of battery, usually my mac gets through the day just fine.
How did the battery life fair after running powertop?
Best Regards,
SilverOne
Yeah, not excellent however the more I read up on this, the more battery life I can eek out of the system
Oh never mind i just read the article
thanks
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Can I remove the entry Ubuntu from the boot page of refind? I uninstalled Ubuntu and I want to suppress this entry.
Thanks in advance
Probably.. I’d have to d what you should, and google it.. Sorry don’t meant to be rude, we progress by searching..
How can I remove an entry of the boot menu? I uninstalled Ubuntu and I want to suppress the entry.
Hi man! I have a MacBook Pro 7,1 with Ubuntu as unique operating system. The system is finely configured (graphics, touchpad, keys, boot resolution, tty fonts and resolution, etc.) reading a lot of articles. But there are one thing that I can’t do. When the power button is pressed to turn on the MacBook, appears a white screen during several seconds (almost one minute). It’s possible to disable or reduce the wait time of this white screen? Thanks!!
I don’t believe you can do that, I think it is the Uefi boot loader timing out. Maybe install refit ? That might resolve it.
Do a search for blessing the partition to boot…I don’t remember where I’ve read it but know that it can be done and requires an OS X install disk (to access Terminal).
After that it shouldn’t sit at that white screen for longer than it does when booting to OS X.