2013 Macbook Air with openSUSE 12.3

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’m looking into installing openSUSE 12.3 on a 2013 Macbook Air 11.6". Has anyone done it? Searches have turned up that Linus uses/used openSUSE with one of the versions of the Air’s. For the 2013 model specifically, it looks like only ArchLinux has been successful used, but with many issues left to resolve.

I chose the Air 11.6" over other ultraportables for three reasons:

  1. 11.6" is a good compromise for travel compactness versus screen size
  2. weight
  3. 9 hours of battery life, mostly due to Intel’s Haswell

Most other manufacturers have abandoned the 11.6" ultraportables market, but if you have a suggestion as to one that is comparable, I would love to know.

Thanks all!

2

Is size a criteria ? I note you chose a computing platform with an 11.6" screen, as opposed to a larger 13". I find if the weight is still light, the larger size does not matter so much.

I chose a very light Intel based Ultrabook (it came with Windows) for my openSUSE-12.3 install. Specifically a Toshiba Satellite Z930, for mostly the same criteria as you, but with one extra criteria, which is I wanted a LOT of external interfaces (ie 3 x USB, HDMI, VGA, Wired Ethernet jack, SD-Card reader, separate headset/mic jacks … ). In fact significant interfaces and VERY light weight were MAJOR criteria for me, and those two criteria thinned the competition for me pretty quick. The Toshiba Z930’s weight of ~1.14 kg is not much more than the 1.03 kg of the Macbook Air 11, and it is significantly lighter than the 1.34 kg of the Macbook Air 13. The Toshiba’s battery life of ~8 hours is pretty good.

I blogged about it here: https://forums.opensuse.org/blogs/oldcpu/opensuse-12-3-toshiba-satellite-z930-ultrabook-144/

3

I’ve been running Suse (12.2 and now 12.3) on a 13" MacBook Air (4,2) as my main notebook and gotten it to the point of working extremely well.

Once you get it all setup, Suse runs beautifully on the MBA. However, as OldCPU pointed out there is other hardware out now that is quite comparable. Dell also has a new ultrabook, and then there is the Chromebook Pixel that looks quite interesting. If you go the MBA route, be prepared to spend some time getting it all to work - hours.

You can pretty much follow the Arch and Ubuntu guides: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir

The main part will be deciding in what partitioning scheme to use and if you want to just boot with UEFI or not.

Some things to consider:
I believe UEFI might have some limitations if you use the Nvidia driver: EFI-Booting Ubuntu on a Mac however, compare this to the information at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting.
and
Apple uses a hybrid partition table, which you can learn about at Hybrid MBRs

I choose to use the reFit boot manager rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit

However I then discovered a fork of this called rEFind which I would suggest The rEFInd Boot Manager: Installing rEFInd

(I wonder what Suse 13.1 M4 might install like, especially if using UEFI boot?)

(You can see there is a TON of great information at the rodsboooks site.)

Once you have decided on the boot and partitioning factors, the actual install should be very straight forward.

Wireless, sound, webcam, mic, thunderbolt VGA/Networking, etc. all worked out of the box with a 3.7 or newer kernel.

The Thunderbolt display works, but only really with 3.10 or 3.11 - there is significant input lag with earlier kernels. Hotplug of the display is not supported and likely won’t be.

Installing powertop and laptop-mode-tools can help a lot with battery life (I get ~3 hours).

Lightum provide auto screen and keyboard backlight dimming https://github.com/poliva/lightum

You can get the Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse to work, but it’s pretty much a huge pain. I can provide the steps I did to get them to work if you like.

4

If in addition to liking GNU/Linux, if one also likes Mac OS-X, then IMHO a Macbook Air is likely the way to go for a nice dual boot (assuming it technically feasible).

But if one is planning on not keeping the Mac OS-X, then there are all sorts of light Intel / Windows OEM devices on which GNU/Linux can be installed. … where my Toshiba was just one example.

In general I have a psychological adversion to Sony products. But I do concede they often have products with nice specifications … For example this 11" Ultrabook which is only 0.9 kg : Review Sony Vaio Pro 11 SVP121M2EB.G4 Ultrabook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews … and there are other Sony Ultrabooks that are light and attractive from a specmanship perspective. … GNU/Linux compatibility would need to be checked in each case.

5

By the way, you are exceedingly unlikely to see anything approaching this with Linux. You might get 5-6 with powertop, and perhaps with the new intel_pstate kernel power management system. Even so, I’d be very skeptical that you could ever get 9 hours with Linux. There are numerous reasons, including wifi drivers which don’t support advanced power management features, etc. Sad, but there you have it.

6

Thanks oldcpu and LewsTherinTelemon!

I suppose the first consideration I had was battery life. I already have a netbook, an Acer Aspire 1410, which runs great with openSUSE 11.4 (what I have installed on it). The size is good. The weight a bit hefty. (I would prefer something weighing just 1 lb., like a tablet.) The battery life, though, is only 3-4 hours. That’s what attracted me to the Macbook Air 11.6". It would provide the one missing thing I’m after: longer battery life, everything else being roughly equal.

I’ll start reading the guides to see if I can invest the time required… (Maybe it might mean I should wait for things to mature a bit more?)

By the way, oldcpu, the notebook review site is great! Thanks for the link!

7

So far as installing on Apple hardware goes, Suse 13.1 might be a bit smoother process if the efi install “just works” on Apple hardware - that would be great, but I think there might still be come tweaks needed.

As for as battery life goes (Apple or other vendor hardware), you might check on the new pstate kernel power management, and the user space tools which exist for it. By tweaking this and using powertop and other tool, you can see how much time you can get, even on your existing hardware to help give an idea of what you might expect from new hardware.

8

Hmm… It might be worth it to wait then…

I’m looking to use this for travel, so I can’t really deal with tinkering while away. I might just stick to MacOS and look for open source programs, like GIMP, to use on it until I can commit to a dual-boot install. I’ll learn what I can now and prepare for later…

Thanks again!

9

As far as I can tell, installing openSUSE 13.1 on my early-2013 Macbook Pro “just works” viz EFI. I have installed a lot of distros on a lot of machines and I am in disbelief about how easy this just was. It’s been about an hour so I am sure to run into problems.
Even little things like the built-in keyboard lights and dimming buttons work “out of the box”.

10

Today I tried installing Opensuse 13.1 on the latest Macbook air. This has been my experience and steps so far:

  1. Download the DVD
  2. dd DVD to USB drive
  3. Hold Option button on MBA boot and choose EFI Boot
  4. Pretty much follow the installation steps nothing out of the ordinary

After the first boot is complete I see the following:

  1. No wireless card detected [Fixed by installing broadcom-wl and the corresponding kernel rpm e.g. desktop]
  2. Keyboard Backlight is missing
  3. No sound from the speakers
11

In short, it’s fixed in 3.13.

As for the keyboard backlight, try this to see if it works at all (with suitable permissions):
echo 255 | tee -a /sys/class/leds/smc::kbd_backlight/brightness

Adjust the number to see changes.

12

Thanks Miuku the keyboard backlight works but now always remains on. I will tinker with some of the other options like trigger, autosuspend to turn it off after a couple of seconds. That is the only piece missing now.

13

Hello,

I currently use ubuntu 13.10 with kernel 3.13rc5 and the broadcom dkms driver and it is working very well! But i would really like to switch to Opensuse, and i got it installed with the default kernel and the broadcom-wl driver from packman! But then i installed the 3.13 kernel from software.opensuse.com and the audio worked nice, but i could not find the broadcom-wl driver for this kernel on packman! What did you to to make it work? Compiled from sources? Does opensuse has Dkms also? Thanks a lot for any information.

Cyro

14

for those who want to install wl-driver from source:

  1. install kernel-headers (source) and build essentials
  2. download hybrid driver here
  3. download patch here (works with kernels 3.10, 3.11, 3.13)
  4. in same folder, untar driver and patch with “patch -p2 < /path/to/patch”
  5. than “make” and “make install”
  6. “depmod” and “modprobe wl”

greets