Debian Wheezy installation on Mac Pro Air Retina
I wanted to briefly summarise my experience installing Debian Wheezy
Alpha release on to this laptop and the problems I had and solutions
required.
I don't know where else to summarise my experiences so I thought a
brief report here might be useful to others.
This took me a long time and I didn't understand everything as I went
so it took me many attempts and use of SuSe installation as described
in (several times):
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/laptop/476258-howto-2012-retina-display-macbook-pro-opensuse-linux.html
which means I don't have an easy sequence of steps to reproduce the instll.
1. MacOS uses EFI booting and GPT partition tables which I don't
believe that debian installer supports. But it does support a Windows
compatible boot system via a Hybrid GPT partition table where
the "protective" MBR appears to have valid primary partitions. The
first 3 are used by MacOS (dual booting) and Windows is expected to be
installed under the 4th.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
2. I used the MacOS to resize the MacOS partition (worked very well)
and allocate another one for Debian but ended up needing others as I
had to install other distributions to get it working under debian.
2. I was not able to install debian into this spare partition with the
Wheezy install candidate directly. I had to use the Suse distribution
to install it, with a seperate USB keyboard/mouse and wireless USB
dongle. This Suse distribution
also installs a GPT aware grub into the Linux partition. Also it is
really nice in that this grub will update it's grub menu to know about
other GPT partitions as well.
Note: To boot up any kernel you need some special option acpi=none or
the machine will hang silently. In the end I copied the full set of
options from the above link for all kernel boots:
acpi=none nomodeset nointremap vga=0x34c
This also let the full resolution of the screen be displayed (which is
pretty small text though!)
3. Once this other partition is installed you can boot it via holding
down the Option key while booting the laptop and selecting it or using
a multi-boot EFI based loader such as described in
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/linux.html
4. I then further split the remaining partition into more partitions
(not listed in the hybrid MBR) and was able to install debian (with
the above options) into that partition. I didn't install a graphical
system - just a simpler server.
But note the following issues:
i. The WPA doesn't work on the native wireless (propriety firmware)
but the installer and the ifup / wpa do *NOT* work unless the wireless
is wlan0. Don't know why but editing the udev rules to make the MACs
set up wlan0 to
my USB dongle wirelss interface and it just worked fine.
ii. The debian grub would install grub that couldn't boot the
system. Not sure if this was just not GPT aware or what - but I had to
use another SUSE installation which would install a grub that also had
entries for debian!
5. The graphics uses nouveau / FB (not sure how these play together).
But the graphics started to work once I had installed:
xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xorg xinit
and I had problems with X11 hanging on start up. I did the following
it started to work: so uninstall xserver-xorg-video-vesa server and
set DPMS off in monitor section:
Section "Monitor"
Option "DPMS" "off"
EndSection
6. Once you have it working under X, you need to work on the default
fonts as they are way small on the Retina display.
Once this is done things are much easier. It is a *very* fast machine.
Hopefully this can help some others avoid the pains I had.
Andrew
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