KerbyServer

I recently took the crazy plunge of installing Fedora 8 on my new MacBook Air. It was an interesting experience given the utter absence of community documentation for running Linux on this brand new computer. I'm hoping to fill some of that void by offering some of my experiences here:

This article on the Mactel Linux website was the closest I could come to getting help on installing Fedora 8 on a MacBook Air:
http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Fedora8OnMacBookSantaRosa

The Santa Rosa MacBook (MacBook 3,1) and the MacBook Air (MacBook Air 1,1) share many similarities. It turns out, however, that just enough things are different to cause several headaches.

I used Apple's Boot Camp Assistant to resize my Mac OS X partition and create some free space for Linux. I installed rEFIt to make booting into Linux a bit easier. As far as the installation goes, I recommend you get access to a USB optical drive. I knew I would hardly have a use for the external optical drive Apple is selling alongside the MacBook Air, so I did not order one. After trying for several hours to get a Linux installer to boot from a USB flash drive or external hard drive, I gave up after realizing that Apple's legacy boot environment (to support BIOS emulation on an EFI system) does not support booting from USB (even though the EFI side of things does...ie, I can boot from Apple's system restore disk once it is cloned to a USB flash drive). To overcome this issue, I took a full size internal CD-RW drive from another computer and connected it to an external 3.5" hard drive enclosure. I was quite happy to see this allowed me to boot from the Fedora 8 boot disk (the boot.iso that Fedora offers with every release).

So, to perform the install, I connected a USB hub to my MacBook Air's single USB port. I connected my USB-CDRW-external drive contraption to the hub as well as another external drive to which I had copied the Fedora 8 DVD ISO (I also formatted the drive as FAT32 from a different Mac so it would be readable by the installer). This funky setup allowed me to install Fedora 8 (x86_64 edition) to the free space on the Air's internal hard drive.

Since I installed GRUB on the Fedora boot partition, rEFIt listed the Fedora install in its boot menu when I restarted after the install. Once I booted into Fedora 8 and set up my user account, I next needed to conquer the hurdle I had been dreading: getting Apple's AirPort card to function under Linux.

The MacBook Air does not have an ethernet port, so I could not be lazy and get a network connection that way. Additionally, Apple's USB ethernet adapter does not even have Windows drivers at this time, so getting it to work in 64bit Linux was a no go. This caused a chicken and egg problem because I wanted to update a few key components (such as the kernel) before tackling the wireless issue. I ended up using my Treo 700p's data connection to temporarily give my MacBook Air access to the Internet (I use an excellent application called USB Modem on my 700p to share its EVDO connection). This allowed me to use yum to see what packages I needed to download to update a few things. I then downloaded these RPMS from another computer to a USB flash drive. I plugged that flash drive into the Air and manually upgraded those packages. In fact, I ended upgrading every package on the system by downloading new RPMS of the larger packages (anything over 1MB) and setting up a local Yum repository on the Air. Yum used the local repository for large packages and downloaded smaller things over the comparably slower EVDO connection.

Moving on to getting wireless to work...I tried everything before nearly tearing my hair out over this one. The MacBook Air's AirPort Extreme card uses a Broadcom 4328 (rev 05) chipset. Unfortunately, the Santa Rosa MacBook uses a 4328 (rev 03) chipset. So, the procedure in the wonderful Mactel Linux article did not work for the MacBook Air. All over the Internet, Linux users point to a specific Dell Windows driver for Broadcom cards (http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXE) that works with NDISwrapper. I installed the NDISwrapper kernel module described in the Mactel Linux article, but the Dell driver just did not do the trick. "ndiswrapper -l" did show that the bcmwl5 driver was installed and the device (14E4:4328) was present, but modprobe ndiwrapper was not able to load the driver/card combination. This made me sad :(. After many more hours of trying different approaches with NDISwrapper and Googling my rear end off, I finally went in search of a different driver. I was having trouble finding anything, but at long last I found a compatible driver!

So, you MacBook Air users out there, download the following HP driver:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp37501-38000/sp37950.exe
Release notes: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp37501-38000/sp37950.html

I had to take that EXE into Windows and launch it to extract the drivers, but once I did that and copied the directory with all the bcmwl... files to the Air, I was able to install a functional bcmwl5 driver in NDISwrapper. The driver loaded successfully and promptly began scanning for available networks. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get WPA working with NDISwrapper+this driver+Fedora, but I hope that will come in time. Despite the lack of WPA, this driver worked nicely and enabled me to continue installing other software and tweak the system.

I am awaiting an update to pommed for better keyboard and backlight support. I am also still trying to get the synaptics driver installed and configured for better trackpad support. My attempts thus far have led to crashing X sessions, but all in good time, I say!