Linux on Macbook Air?

been thinking about laptops for quite some time now and I was wondering about running linux on a Macbook, as their build quality (and price) are unrivaled and im interested in eGPU with a thunderbolt port, and uninstalling OSX completely, I prefer linux in every possible way as i can configure it to specifically suit my needs, but even with a clean install of linux on a mac i am sure there is a hoax of problems

Was wondering how well linux runs off of a Mac, probably an Air, paticularily if there are any GPU problems or problems with the ports (specifically thunderbolt and sd card), i intend to use wine or some other software to play some windows games on linux in addition to general usage.

 

First, Bootcamp does not support Linux, so you don't even want to try and do that. Second, if you are going to try a native install, you may find that the "hobby overhead" is too great. By "hobby overhead", I mean the amount of time and effort to required to manage the project, both initially and on an initial ongoing basis. Not that it can't be done, but securing just the drivers necessary to operate the entire hardware scheme (Thunderbolt, GPU, SD Card, USB, etc) is going to be enormously time consuming, to say the least. That doesn't even cover implementation.

I run Linux on my MacBook Air with virtually no "hobby overhead", by running it in a VM environment that supports the OS (VMware Fusion). It runs blazing fast and just works. I can think of no practical reason to run Linux on Mac otherwise, notwithstanding some emotional reasons (like a sense of accomplishment).

But really, if the only reason you are using a computer is to run Linux, then using a MacBook is questionable.

 

You'll run into quite a few problems doing this, and it's not likely that you'll get all of the internal hardware working perfectly (wifi, thunderbolt, sd card, bluetooth) - much less an external GPU functioning through the thunderbolt port.

I don't know if you know how well Wine works as of now, but compatibility and performance is not anything like what you would get running windows. Lots of games simply won't work. There are lots of games that won't run on a MBA even with windows.

If you uninstall OS X completely, you lose the ability to get firmware updates for your hardware.

That's all.

 

VM is always an option but i dont think i will ever get over the feeling of running OSX, an operating system that i have no love for, just so i can get linux running from a v-box, plus there is that feeling that it could always run better by itself.

You are probably right though, running linux on macbook is too niche to ever hope for any decent support for drivers, etc, and i would be better off running it from a windows laptop.

Oh well, i guess you can't have it all, compromises have to be made somewhere.

 

thank you for the replies guys, maybe just going for linux off of VM and pretending and just ignoring the OSX might be the only option if i want a a thin and light laptop with amazing build quality ala Macbook Air with linux and the future possibility of running a decent GPU with the thunderbolt port.

 

There are other laptops that are similar. post in the "What notebook should I buy?" thread. Fill out the form. Mention you want a laptop that is physically similar to the macbook air with solid linux support. You could also mention eGPU support, but I don't think you're going to experience buyer's remorse trying to run games in linux in wine with an eGPU when you could have just used windows.

You should consider a different OS setup, such as dual-booting win/linux and using windows just for games and eGPU.

 

While Bootcamp doesn't "support" Linux, you can install it fine. Support is what is intentional, not what may actually work. There are no special drivers made for Linux, so you may have trouble getting certain hardware parts functioning correctly, but I've triple booted a Mac before and its possible to get Linux working decently... with or without Bootcamp. You don't even need Bootcamp to install Windows, its just a tool that helps, so there is little need to use it for Linux either.

 

Yes. I have run Linux on an Air. In a word: rEFIt

You shouldn't even need the mactel PPA anymore. Most of it "just works". pommed handles the hotkeys and some hardware features.

Don't remove OS X though, you need it for firmware updates at the very minimum.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir

http://wiki.debian.org/MacBookAir

 

I'm currently running Ubuntu P.Pangolin on my MBA but it's from within bootcamp and VMWare. Everything works just fine, not sure if the situation would change with real install.

 

In a VM all of your hardware (excluding things like VT-x and VT-d) and BIOS/EFI layer is virtualized so it is quite different. Direct hardware support is a different experience. Linux will always run fine in a VM.

 

I'd love to get another drive and play with it in a clean install. Should be fun

 

I triple-booted my late 2010 MBA for a while: OS X for general use, Win 7 for Office & games, Ubuntu for actual work. I've since discovered Parallels is great for running Windows. And it turns out OS X's BSD roots are close enough to Linux that I've been able to adapt my work to stay within OS X, so I was able to reclaim my Ubuntu partitions for extra space.

Aside from the complexities of triple-booting, it was no harder to get Ubuntu to work on the MBA as on my VAIO F, and all the MBA hardware worked. The post-install configuration is nicely documented at the link ALLurGroceries posted, but I did not follow all of it. Specifically, I left out the nvidia dithering settings changes which are just wrong (these don't apply to the Sandy Bridge models, so ignore) and I also did not install macfanctld because temp & fan speed control seemed perfectly fine without it and I didn't want to mess it up.

However, I think you can forget about using an eGPU over Thunderbolt in Linux. There is no Thunderbolt support in Linux yet and who knows how long it will take before that support is ready. When it is available I suspect it will only support disk drives. Besides, think about what you're proposing. You want to play Windows games on Linux through Wine using an eGPU connected to a MacBook Air. Could you swim upstream any harder?

 

This is a huge issue. For games, a windows license can be had relatively cheap, and your games will have high compatibility and work well, and you might even have a slim chance at getting an eGPU running, maybe. Having a libre software setup is great, but you should factor in that most of the games you intend to run through wine are probably proprietary / closed source anyways, so you aren't earning yourself much of a moral-victory by playing these games through wine on linux.

Not that it's a completely worthless endeavor, just that you should realize the dynamic of the situation to see how much value is actually there, and then see how many hurdles you are going to have to jump through to get there, and then realize that even in the ideal situation if everything was working and reasonably stable - including the thunderbolt eGPU, which has no support right now - that you would end up having spent hours upon hours on this setup only to have fractional game performance and compatibility compared to just using windows. Food for thought

 

For firmware updates, you can put OS X on an external drive and boot that if needed.

The full feature set of Thunderbolt is relatively simple to support once a little bit of PCIe hotplug scaffolding is implemented. This is likely minor fixes if it's not already working. At the GPU driver level it's just another card on the PCI bus, no extra work needed. I have an Ivy Bridge MacBook Air on the way and I'll be running Ubuntu on it to do exactly this.

Thunderbolt is especially well suited for use with an eGPU, it's the best bandwidth you can get to an external card. The MacBook Air is an excellent Thunderbolt capable laptop, perfect choice even if you're using Linux.

There's a bunch of native Linux games these days and there will be more. Wine fills in lots of gaps and in many cases is pretty painless now.

Edit:
Thunderbolt PCIe devices already work if plugged in at boot: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/4/4

 

Btw, is completely removing OSX and installing Win7 possible without much hassle (e.g. would hardware work properly)?
Also why are firmware updates so important if you don't want to use OSX? Is there some other advantage affecing all installed OSes?

 

When you operate on a computer, there is hardware (the keyboard, display, trackpad, speakers, CPU, GPU, storage drive, wifi chip, bluetooth, ports, battery, etc)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the operating system. This is basically an application abstraction layer. You run applications on the operating system, and the operating system also connects to all of the hardware devices and orchestrates their interaction.

To connect each hardware device (physical) to the operating system (logical) you need a special piece of software called a driver. This is basically a bridge between the physical device and the logical operating system.

But each of these devices also carries out some autonomous function. If it wasn't capable of doing anything, there would be no point in connecting it to the operating system. The operating system merely gets an interface to work with the hardware (that's the driver). The hardware has to provide some functionality that is autonomous. That functionality is controlled through software that doesn't run on the operating system, but on the actual hardware devices. This type of software is called firmware. Changes to firmware apply to your computer no matter what operating system you use, because they don't have anything to do with the operating system. They are usually critically important, and relatively infrequent.

Your hardware will continue working if you remove OS X, but you lose the ability to get firmware updates, which are generally important.

 

I see. Thanks for the great explanation .