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During the last three years, my Macbook Air has been kinda depressed. Every time i tried to install my free GNU programs using ports it has silently played this tune for me.

I am the wilderness locked in a cage
I am a growing force you kept in place
I am a tree reaching for the sun

Release me!
Release me!

I have heard this song during the last years and never really done anything about it, until today when i accidentally destroyed the Mac OS X operating system on my Macbook. When this happens, your Macbook will just boot to a white screen and display a small spinner and do nothing, yey! Mac OS X is probably the best non-free operating system out there, everything just works out of the box. I think one of the main reasons that made me feel somehow trapped inside in the Darwin world is that I could not get my terminal and Vim editor to work as smooth as on my Gentoo box. So i decided to install Linux on my Macbook :)

I downloaded the latest Gentoo build and everything booted up pretty good except that the keyboard didn’t work, my first plan was then to boot an Ubuntu CD and install Gentoo from it. When booting up the Ubuntu 10.04 CD I was in shock, since it was my first graphical installation since i changed to Gentoo many years ago. Damn it looks good now days!

Since the Ubuntu installation had me in shock I continued the installation, the process was really straightforward and easy, you can’t really compare it to a stage1 Gentoo huzzle installation. I have no clue what Ubuntu installed on my drive but I’m pretty happy have to have Linux running on my Macbook without any effort.

I come from gentoo-land and I don’t see my self changing it from my desktop computer for a while, but for my laptop i think Ubuntu is a solid pick since most peripherals just works out of the box!

Update:

• To fix the the touchpad after a sleep, reload the bcm5974 kernelmodule using the following script. Add it to /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/02touchpad and set correct permissions

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ -e '/usr/lib/pm-utils/functions' ];then
      . /usr/lib/pm-utils/functions
    fi
  
    suspend_bcm5974() { /sbin/rmmod bcm5974; }
    resume_bcm5974() { /sbin/modprobe bcm5974; }
  
    case "$1" in
      suspend|hibernate)
        suspend_bcm5974;
      ;;
      thaw|resume)
        resume_bcm5974;
      ;;
      *)
      ;;
    esac
    exit $?
  

• Direct link to the Ubuntu releases
• Before booting you macbook with the Ubuntu installation CD, read about the startup shortcuts