[linux-audio-user] To MacBook or not to MacBook, that's the question

Tracey Hytry shakti at bayarea.net
Sun Mar 18 05:01:56 EDT 2007


Ok, so I'm too lazy to post something original,  so I'll repost part of something that I posted here last dec 12th.

As and aside;  the last I hear is that you can get the wireless working if you are using the NDIS drivers under 32bit linux (the one I had experience with is running 64bit gentoo).

Part of old msg:

Last week I had the interesting experience helping set up linux on on a 17" Apple notebook(the high end one, dual core, bla, bla, bla).  We managed to get linux on the machine and get it to boot separately from osX with a lot of work, but with a lot of satisfaction afterwards.

Since the macbook pros are EFI partitioned monsters it took a while to get something to boot on it in the first place.  This is where 64Studio surprised me, it was able to deal with the 2 partitions that we could use on the machine, and even install on it(no, we never tested a full install of 64Studio).

Anyway, after that we copied over a 64 bit gentoo system that was compiled for the hardware in the machine(which is also kind of hard since intel dual cores are new to gcc).  The networking on the ethernet port was pretty easy to set up and we were able to finish the install from the local gentoo repo.  Then, everything was recompiled again on the native machine.

 Graphics look good(open gl, etc), lots of stuff works(even the intel HDA sound was real good on it(Apple must use the better stuff on that machine)).  The only show stopper is that linux hasn't caught up to the newest wireless chipset in that machine.  We fixed that by buying a $40 wireless usb stick and using it for wireless.  Last I heard, there are also a few jack xrun issues on the intel dual core in there, but I think they may be worked out.

Anyway, the macbook pro makes a real great linux machine.  OSX is still there if they want to boot into Steve Jobs wonderfull world of eye candy.  This machine was bought to use as a linux machine, the actual cost wasn't a whole lot more then any other make for something in that high end of hardware.

So:

64Studio works great here, it even has some special abilities.
The intel chipset actually sounds pretty good with linux in some cases.

Tracey.



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