Re: Duel Booting Debian on a Mac
> In the end I uninstalled Debian because of the following problems:
>
> 1. The brightness of the screen does not readjust after
> suspend/resume in Debian (I worked hard trying to solve this with
> some published hacks, but no full success).
>
> 2. Often the Mac got hot with closed lid, eating the battery. This
> seems caused by the above firmware manipulation hack.
>
> 3. Ugrades of OSX seem to damage the reFind configuration. Also there
> is a problem writing the hidden rescue partition during an upgrade of
> OSX.
> \
I'm writing this from wheezy on my macbook pro (2011). It took a while
to get it working well but now it has been for >> 1 year. Some of the
key things that have helped:
1. Refind boot manager - I have it on the OS X partition. so of course I
have to go into OS X to edit it. This works out OK though. OS X
upgrades disable it but the program that comes with it can be easily
run within OS X to re-enable it. The only inconvenience is that this
happens rarely so I don't remember what to do....I use some parameters
to the kernel in the refind configuration file to disable intel graphics
etc, see below....
2. open source AMD video driver. This macbook model has Intel low power
and AMD high power graphics cards. I have never been able to switch
between them successfully in Linux. I used to use the Intel and had the
problem above that when you suspend it doesn't come back in a working
state (black screen). By disabling the intel and using AMD open source
I'm getting good results. The AMD driver in recent kernels is good and
doesn't burn the battery badly, AND suspend/resume works fine. As in
totally reliably. AMD closed source would probably result in trouble
with dkms etc and might not resume, I decided not to even try that.
Also, you need AMD for HDMI. (I can use HDMI as external monitor ) I
know some models have nVidia not AMD-- maybe the same logic applies for
that.
3. nonfree firmware is needed for wifi. you can get atheros based
usb-connecting external Wifi adapters if you need to. I did that for a
bit, then I got the broadcom going and that's more convenient.
4. touchpad - there are many tutorials online about this, don't recall
exact steps. I have two finger scrolling working well, I just use lower
right corner for right click.
5. I don't try to boot straight to the GUI (or gdm3 etc), I boot to
text mode and run a script with the following commands (as root) to fix
some things with the graphics and power management:
#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/gdm3 stop
modprobe radeon
echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
/etc/init.d/gdm3 start
I've been using this for so long I don't remember how it works or even
exactly what it does but it works. Incidentally suspend/resume works in
GRAPHICS mode as you would want it to. This script is only for a fresh
boot and as you can see takes me right to gdm3 to log in.
things I have never resolved: screen brightness keys, keyboard
brightness keys - I'm not sure if hibernate would work as I don't have
a swap partition to use for it. I did make shell scripts to do these
things and they can be mapped to key combinations in various ways if
those things are a priority.
Lately I decided to try and ditch pulseaudio (I don't like systemd etc,
just an experiment really) and found that alsa and jack are working OK
for me, including output to HDMI.
I went a long time without looking at OS X, recently I was in it to
play a game some, really overall wheezy/enlightenment/amarok etc is
better IMHO then the OS X equivalents. And it's FREE.........
John Holland
jholland@vin-dit.org
gpg public key ID 0xEFAF0D15
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