On the Retina MacBook Pro

mattatron · #1 14th July 2012, 03:08 AM

Anyone on this list that has, or is thinking about buying the Retina display MacBook Pro and wants to run any form of Linux on it, should watch the progress of what Greg Kroah-Hartman is doing to get it working on this hardware.

He has just announced that he has managed to get Gentoo booting directly into the EFI on Google +.

smr54 · #2 14th July 2012, 12:32 PM

This will interest a few folks on the forum. Sigh, why do people use vidoes rather than writing it down?

I see at least one of the comments is also asking for documentation--a 30 second vidoe is not going to be too useful.

mattatron · #3 14th July 2012, 12:51 PM

Greg is on the kernel team, I'm pretty sure he'll document it once he has it working satisfactorily.

smr54 · #4 14th July 2012, 02:33 PM

Excellent. As mentioned, there's another thread about this somewhere, and I suspect that some of the folks there will really be helped by it.

mattatron · #5 19th July 2012, 11:27 PM

@smr54: Got a link to that thread?

smr54 · #6 20th July 2012, 02:52 AM

I meant this one--I think you're on it though.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=281038

mattatron · #7 6th August 2012, 10:35 AM

Just a quick update on this thread:

Since getting my Retina Macbook I've been running OS X pretty successfully with the help of Homebrew to provide the toolset which OS X cannot. Things like htop, rdiff-backup and nmap are all not on OS X by default and the installation of them using Homebrew is really simple and effective.

I've also created a small 50GB partition to experiment with Linux on the hardware. I've installed rEFIt and have tried daily builds of Xubuntu/Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal to see how well it all works. (I did try Fedora 17, but it died shortly after grub with some error I cannot remember.)

The experience is far from perfect. Booting requires the use of "noacpi" and "nomodeset".
The Broadcom wifi adapter works once you have used b43-fwcutter to install the firmware and modprobe the modules.
I have not been able to get the Nvidia drivers working correctly, although admittedly I haven't spent too much time trying yet.
The good news is that is runs blindingly fast, so once we have all the kinks worked out, it will be a great Linux laptop.

I asked Greg Kroah-Hartman for an update on his trials to get Linux working on it and he responded with a succinct: "no x yet, being worked on."