Macbook Pro 2010, Linux?

How well does Linux run on the latest Macbook Pros? Last I've heard was Linux had difficulty booting because it required EFI. In order to boot some sort of BIOS emulation was used; this however caused it to boot slowly and have other glitches. Does Linux run smoothly on macs now?

 

No clue. But if you're not running OSX on a Mac, prepare to be disappointed. Even OSX makes them overheat easily when just barely loaded: MacBook Pro Overheats Core i7 Processor at over 100 Degrees Celsius - Too hot to handle - Softpedia

 

I though they fixed these issues by now. I guess I'm gonna go with the T61P then.

 

I'm not sure the current Linux compatibility, but the Envy is designed a lot like the Mac except it doesn't overheat. It'll boot into fairly vanilla Linux fine at least, I don't know about the ACPI support and all though.

 

I heard the envy had some sort of bios error, no way to boot Linux as well. If I remember correctly the T61P suffers from a defective Nvidia GPU. Does anyone know another notebook similar to a quality of Thinkpad and Macs that runs linux?

 

OP, I successfully installed openSUSE 11.2 as well as Ubuntu 9.10 on a late '09 iMac. no clue about the MBP. but, fwiw, I use rEFIt.

 

Sony notebooks have good quality, but it can be a little tricky getting some of the drivers and stuff working with linux from what I have read. Then again I have only research linux on my Vaio TT and something about the intel gpu, and intel wifi was going to be a bit tricky last I checked a year ago.

 

If you're getting a notebook to just run Linux, there are much better alternatives than a MacBook.

The T61p would be a good idea (although you would have to get one used) as they use Atheros or Intel wifi cards that are supported "out of the box" so to speak.

HP makes some notebooks that look like a MacBook, but at a significantly lower price and build quality is probably the same.

 

Doesn't the T61P suffer from bad gpus from nvidia?

 

I don't like to get ****ed by Apple, either, and thus would also go with a PC laptop. However, there are def Linux users out there that disagree with your statement. Linux Torvalds comes to mind (he uses Apple hardware afaik).

 

Linus Torvalds doesn't know squat about linux. *bolts*





:laugh:

 

This thread is relevant to my interests. I have been looking for a moderately powerful laptop linux compatible laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU that isn't made of cheap plastic designed to fail in a year or so. From what I can tell most of the choices with decent GPU's are either have Optimus or ATI cards in them. Not so sure about the T61p but from what I can tell the best non-MBP option is the Thinkpad W510, its not much cheaper than the MBP but its got the Quadro Fx version of the MBP's GPU with more graphical RAM and an actual quadcore i7. If anyone knows of a good alternative that I've missed please let me know, I've been meaning to make a thread in the "find me a laptop!' section but I haven't gotten around to it.
As for the Linux compatibility of the 2010 MBP I think that depends on the distro but it bears mentioning that since all the 2010 MBP's share pretty similar hardware so there's technically a pretty large userbase of people out there sharing the same hardware and the likelihood of people writing drivers/fixing glitches is better.
Just as an example here is the page for Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro7-1/Lucid if you look back through the logs you'll see that over time the support for most of the features has eventually emerged.
Oh and I'm guessing the heat problems people are talking about are due to the fact that there's no GPU switching outside of OSX so you've got that discrete GPU just pumping heat into the case. Can't really avoid the whole no-GPU-switching problem but you can control the fan speeds to dissipate the heat.

 

If you look up the experiences of Ubuntu users with the MBP, you'll find that almost nothing works. Apple computers are, as a general design rule, tightly integrated with the company's proprietary OS, Mac OS X. As such, their hardware has been chosen and configured with utter disregard for other options beyond installing Windows via Bootcamp. If you want a Linux-friendly laptop, I'd recommend Lenovo's offerings; however, stay away from hybrid-graphics systems (which Linux has not implemented yet).

 

Really? That seems a bit contradictory to what I've seen. If you look at the link I provided (or this one that refers to the i5/i7 chipset found in the 15 and 17 inch MBP's https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro6-2/Lucid) in the post directly above yours it seems to be pretty well documented that a good amount of stuff works or is being fixed. The "almost nothing works" complaints were from when the new generations of the MBP's came out last Spring and it seems like (from what I can tell by searching through the Ubuntu support forums) that problems are being addressed.

I'm not suggesting that everything would work right out of the box but lets be honest here, if we were expecting everything to work perfect without any effort on our part we wouldn't be using Linux now would we ?