I installed Fedora 8 on my macbook the other day just to tinker and see how the other side live and I wanted to make sure I got a few things written down concerning the installation. I had to dig & dig to get it to work, so here’s to hoping others will not have the same problem. (Anyone else notice there seems to be much more Ubuntu documentation than there is for Fedora and other distributions?)
Installation
The first issue I had was that the installer would begin, load the kernel from the CD and then just freeze and hang. The fix I found for this was using two kernel parameters:
nohz=off nolapic
Once getting past that I then had a really annoying key press repeat error. Anything I pressed on the keyboard was inputted twice. To get rid of that I also used:
irqpoll
In the end, to get the installer to work on my Macbook (C2D, second gen) I hit esc at the installer initial prompt and entered the following:
linux askmethod irqpoll nohz=off nolapic
After installation everything seems to work well enough. I’ve found a few annoyances like the touchpad not having the features it does out-of-the-box like Ubuntu (scrolling, right-click, etc). Also my wireless will work after building from source (also something needed on Ubuntu), but it won’t actually connect to anything. If anyone has any tips in that regard it is a:
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5418 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
update: the above restriction only applies to NetworkManager 0.7. If I configure it manually it’ll work fine..
Sound seems to work ok. Resolution and graphics are fine as well. Volume and brightness hotkeys don’t work as they do in Ubuntu, but that isn’t a huge deal. Probably something that can be fixed with a couple quick bug reports. Over all, not too shabby… other than the initial trouble of actually getting it to work!
> If anyone has any tips in that regard it is a:
Use the packages provided by Livna, which are precompiled Kernel modules of madwifi.. See http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/ When it works, you could have a look at http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=119282415503974&w=2 in order to help the Madwifi devs building a fully open source wlan driver for Atheros cards (without binary blob).
Regarding the hotkeys, have a look at http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/
Would also be good if you could report a bug at http://bugzilla.redhat.com regarding the need of using those kernel parameters.
For me, installing from the Live CD was simple, but the DVD hung at loading /sbin … maybe that’s where your commands would work. Like Ubuntu, the packaged madwifi wireless drivers don’t work – I guess you need to compile from trunk like on Ubuntu.
Due to the wireless stuff, and having trouble running various multimedia stuff, I went back to Gutsy but my hard disk just keeps whirling – So, I figure when more experience comes out on running Fedora 8 on the MacBook – then I might try again – needs a real good wiki page like the one on the Ubunutu site.