I’ve installed Tumbleweed on my old 2007 macbook pro and everything seems to be working ok except for the keyboard.
It seems to be impossible to change the layout and model in the GUI.
I had to set through setxkbmap to make it work properly.
However this workaround isn’t optimal as I can’t switch that easily between model and layout.
Anybody got a clue about that strange behavior ?
Hi and welcome to the Forum 
Can you confirm what desktop environment (eg KDE, GNOME, XFCE etc) your using and also are you running Xorg or Wayland?
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
If running one of Xorg or Wayland, have you tried the other?
Where are my manners ?!
Hi !
Thanks for your answer.
So here it is, I’m on KDE and XDG_SESSION_TYPE says x11
Following your suggestion, I’ve tried wayland and it seems to do the trick.
I can now get a icon switch from one layout to another.
However wayland seems to be unstable on my configuration.
I had messages saying that KDE has crash and I did have a freeze.
So, wayland seems to be out of the viable options.
At least now I know the issue is x11 related…
I’ll dig into it but if anybody has any clues…
Hi
It’s probably the old intel card and page flips, there is finally a fix on the way (2+ year bug), but if you add the following grub boot option;
video=SVIDEO-1:d
That hopefully will improve the experience on Wayland.
I have a macbook3,1 (late 2007), but I run x11 and GNOME 
Thanks, Interesting !
That might explain many things.
I ended up installing tumbleweed because, despite installing Leap without any major problems, after updating and rebooting, the display was acting up.
Giving a lot of flickering, blacked out secondary display. Might have switch to wayland at some point.
I don’t really want to scrap my current install, so I’ll stay with tumbleweed and make some tests with the grub option and see how it works.
Just for the record and in case anyone might have the same idea of using a 10+ macbook.
openSUSE works great on my 2007 macbook pro with an SSD and 4G or RAM, booting in about 30s.
Gnome, KDE and XFCE are all giving a very good user experience. It’s even hard to tell the computer is so old because, using the system, firing up Firefox, Libreoffice, Digikam and making a pretty heavy use of the all thing turned out a be very fluid.
All the mac hardware seems to be correctly detected out of the box (wifi, backlight, keyboard light, sound, webcam). openSUSE was one of the very few linux distro to pull that off.
I’ll update once I’ve done the tests.
Just to know, may I ask why you’re running x11 on your macbook and is there a real benefit switching to wayland (besides having the correct keyboard layout) ?
Hi
In Leap there is a kernel work around so in theory not needed… The reason I run x11 is that I use synergy (no wayland support) to bounce around multiple machines with same keyboard mouse
I also have a package called mbpfan so you can set the fan speeds…
https://software.opensuse.org/package/mbpfan?search_term=mbpfan
It seems that the fans are correctly managed so I’m not changing anything on that front at least for now.
I’ve made some test, so, on the plus side the option does help on the flickering side, however, it does partially freezes.
gKrellm is still running, but except its window, no click works anywhere.
And apparently, last freeze did break something.
Boot sequence stops mid-air with the rolling tumbleweed logo freezing.
Seems I’m back to square one. I’ll stick with x11 and the setxkbmap workaround. Making a little script to switch to a pc model shouldn’t be a problem.
That is, once i’ll have imported my backup.
Unless you have some other ideas…
Hi
What filesystem are you running, btrfs? If so, could try a different i/o scheduler, I use the following kernel boot option;
scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=1
This switches to block multi-queue, there have been some issues on large file transfers and ext4 and scheduler set to none, but the fix is in the next kernel. Your scheduler will change to mq-deadline since your running a SSD automatically as it’s all supported in Tumbleweed.
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
[mq-deadline] kyber bfq none
This should sort out the freezes…
Well, it’s been a fun night. Haven’t had that much fun since trying to install Kheops linux in the 90’.
So, pretty much everything blew up, including my backup.
I had the idea that the good old dd/gz disk backup was a pretty solid solution for a full system backup, but apparently not.
It took aproximatly forever to tell me that the disk was full, eventhough it was an image of the very same disk. Of course, I tested it, just in case there’s been some major problem and tons of bad sectors, but nothing.
So, as my install didn’t have much datas and tweaks, I took on to make a clean install of Tumbleweed.
Fun fact: it seems that the tumbleweed DVD freezes when it boots on a computer with a broken install on it.
I used a rescue CD to wipe the disk and finally boot with the tumblweed DVD.
So for now, I’m going to cool my jets on having the keyboard layout working and wayland and stick with x11 and setxkbmap.
I’ll also try not to sneeze to hard near this thing because it seems to be a bit touchy. I’m pretty sure (and hope) it’s related to the outdated hardware, but still.
All I need to figure out now is how to make a full system backup that actually works…
Thanks for your help.
Hi
Since you took some time to look into the problem, I figured I could try all the available solutions.
So, I made a clean install of TW and tried the option :
scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=1
It did help with the freezes on wayland, but, KDE is still very unstable and crash and restart every now and then.
Also, the option seems to break something on the power management because, the mac won’t go to sleep when I close the laptop.
So I reverted back to x11, and everything seems to be working OK.
Thx for your help.
On Sun 09 Dec 2018 02:56:03 PM CST, jkrafft wrote:
Hi
Since you took some time to look into the problem, I figured I could try
all the available solutions.
So, I made a clean install of TW and tried the option :
scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=1
It did help with the freezes on wayland, but, KDE is still very unstable
and crash and restart every now and then.
Also, the option seems to break something on the power management
because, the mac won’t go to sleep when I close the laptop.
So I reverted back to x11, and everything seems to be working OK.
Thx for your help.
Hi
Glad you stuck too it and have a workable solution
I put it down to graphic card age… they are good, but still long in
the tooth I wonder if spectre mitigations also have a play. All hard
to say since I’m a GNOME user, but also use x11 at the moment…
Awhile back there was some integration issues with plasma and logind
settings, that may be the cause of lid closure and going to sleep.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-25.25-default
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Hey guys
Just some follow up on my case.
Everything is running rather smoothly except for Firefox display which was getting flickery and unstable when scrolling.
That lead me to install chromium where the problem doesn’t show. However, that lead me to a very noisy laptop with fans running full speed.
When I rebooted, I had a glimpse of an kernel message saying something about temperature threshold and cpu throttling.
That could probably explain some problems. So, I dismantle the whole thing, wiped the old dried out thermal paste and replaced it.
I seemed to improve things a bit. So I installed gKrellm so I can monitor the bunch of sensors available (there’s a few).
I also install mbpfan malcolmlewis suggested and that improved things a lot. You just have to know that when installing mbpfan, the service is disabled.
Now things are running good, I just have a sensor, TGTV, displaying a high temp (125°C). That sensor is GPU related if I understand apple sensor naming scheme, but I have no other infos on that. All in all, it seems, lots of my problem are related to the GPU.
Thx again for the help.
Hi
I run a custom config for sensors;
cat /etc/sensors.d/applesmc
chip "applesmc-isa-0300"
label fan1 "Exhaust Fan"
label temp1 "Battery"
label temp2 "CPU Package"
label temp3 "CPU Proximity"
label temp4 "Memory Bank (A1)"
label temp5 "Northbridge Proximity"
label temp6 "Unknown"
label temp7 "Airport Proximity"
label temp8 "Heatpipe 1"
label temp9 "Heatpipe ?"
label temp10 "Heatpipe ?"
chip "coretemp-*"
label temp2 "CPU Core 0"
label temp3 "CPU Core 1"
The best reference I found was here;
The sensors -u command gives the info needed to create the file.
Interesting, however, 125°C was transitional, the temperature stabilize at 127°C.
I’ve read a bunch of things now and, someone pointed out that 127 was the max value of a signed byte.
That and the fact that 127°C is really hot and would probably destroy some component, I’m now pretty sure that its either a malfunctioning sensor or a sensor that doesn’t measure temperature.
In any case, I’ll discard this sensor reading and focus on the sensors that are actually giving something I can work with.
Hi
You can set to ignore, or maybe it needs to be diode rather than a thermistor, try setting to 1 or 2 eg;
set <sensor -u name> 1
or
set <sensor -u name> 2