My experiences with Macbook Air 6.1 and openSUSE 42.3.

English Hardware
1

Hello everyone,

I decided to upgrade from 42.1 to 42.3 on my Macbook Air 6.1 and in case there are any other macbook users out there, here are my experiences and hopefully I can save you some time and trouble. =)

I did the installation by downloading the image file and writing it to a usb stick with the gnome-shell Disks utility. Insert in mac, press alt, and off you go. As usual, the mouse does not work but since it is entirely possible to go through the graphical installation with keyboard only, that is no big problem.

After choosing “Upgrade” and not install, and completing the upgrade, there were three problems.

  1. Gnome-shell crashing frequently

I did a bit of searching and running the following seems to work:
zypper rm drm-kmp-default
zypper al drm-kmp-default

  1. Tracker bug/Logs eating disk space

There seems to be a bug in tracker that causes systemd to do frequent and big coredumps and also eating up al CPU. The solution to this (the temporary solution, well, I don’t use tracker so for me it is a permanent solution) is to:

Turn off tracker in the gui.
Edit /etc/systemd/coredump.conf and changing the storage setting to none like this:
Storage=none

I’m not a development so I have no need of coredumps.

  1. Wireless

In 42.1 I had to download extra broadcom drivers in two rpm packages. This did not work, and therefore wireless did not work. I’m not quite clear what made it work, but basically I remove all broadcom drivers except the firmware-download program, and then removed all broadcom drivers with modprobe -r driver name, and now I am only relying on wl. My lsmod looks like this:

wl 6451200 0
cfg80211 614400 1 wl

And now there is only one unsolved annoying bug left.

  1. Trackpad.

It is not possible any longer to disable “tap to click”. There is a new input driver that only let’s me change the functionality of the mouse buttons but nothing else. Hopefully I can either revert to a previous driver or there will be an update along eventually. =(

Apart from that, everything works fine.

Note that this could in part be to me going from 42.1 and ironing out the small bugs with suspend, monitor brightness etc. previously as outlined here (https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/520116-My-experiences-with-Macbook-Air-6-1-(2013-model)-and-OpenSUSE-Leap-41-1).

Enjoy, and if you managed to solve the trackpad problem, please let me know.

Best regards,
Dan

2

Hmm, can’t find any editing functionality, so I guess I’ll have to update this way. About point 3, wireless, it turned out that in fact I do need to add the package broadcom-wl-kmp-default-6.30.223.271_k4.4.92_31-9.3.x86_64.rpm.

Then remove b43, b43legacy and wl (the rpm), and add just the wl driver. Then wireless works.

To get everything to work after boot, add b43 and b43legacy to /etc/modprobe/50-blacklist.conf, then sudo mkinitrd, reboot, and now wireless works from start.

However… b43 and b43legacy are still listed there, so I’m working on removing them, since wireless works with only wl listed.

Best regards,
Dan

3

Hah! And for problem

  1. Trackpad.

Just install gsynaptics, go to terminal, write gsynaptics, and then just disable tap to click in the gui.

Problem solved! =)

Best regards,
Dan