Macbook Air (early 2011) Install [solved] in 2020

[jesnow]

I've had this machine for nearly a decade, and it's seen me through some really intense times! It seemed like such a beast at the time. I always meant to install Gentoo on it, but it was always a work machine -- purchased exactly so that I could have some thing that would for sure open the files my colleagues might send me. that was an issue a decade ago.

Well so now it's got the computing power of a Raspberry Pi. Maybe a little less, but a nice screen and first class sound. It's really a legacy machine now. Apple no longer supports it. MacOS isn't a very nice operating system anyway. Ever try to copy and paste text without using the keyboard? But I digress. It's still a beautiful looking machine dents and all. It's living room capable, or at least can be a media player in the man cave. But first we need to get Linux on it.

Here is the ancient Gentoo wiki:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Macbook_Pro_(early_2011)

And some contemporaneous forum posts:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-876287-start-0.html

None of this will work now. Getting gentoo going has different constraints than it did a decade ago. Compiling is pretty much out. Refit is a distant memory. Here's how I did it today (mid-2020 COVID-19 inspired).

1) Booting. You need an EFI capable boot disk. But the MBA has no cd/dvd drive and no wired ethernet: Double whammy. Gentoo minimal install cd currently can do EFI boot from USB, but does not have the necessary broadcom wifi drivers, so it's a dead end. Just forget it. Poor thing is stuck in Plato's cave.

2) And you're better off with mac-native tools to partition if you want to save the mac partition. Which I don't need to blow away, so I only used 32G for linux and 8G for swap. Partitioned it, so that I would just do the format on linux. Later on that proved useful, but not how I thought it would.

3) If you're going to install on a machine that needs a week to compile firefox, there aren't many options: CloverOS. This is really magic. Only one problem, it doesn't boot on EFI. So what I did was use etcher on the mac side to burn it to USB. Works. Formats ext4! Installs! Amazingly quickly. But doesn't boot. time for another rabbit hole...

4) Refind is pretty damn cool! Badly documented, but so, so cool. You download and unzip it on the mac side. You then need to boot from the rescue partition (I didn't even know it existed) by booting while holding down command-shift-R. Then you can get a rescue terminal, mount the EFI partition (which helpfully is always /dev/disk0) and run the refind install script on it. I felt like Indiana Jones finding this stuff. Think of refind as a LILO or GRUB that can find partitions without being told they're there. Damn that's good! OK here's the missing part: You need a disk driver for the refind efi boot environment or nothing will work. It just can't read your ext4 partition. Fortunately they provide one, but you have to install that by hand by copying it to a directory calld (strangeley enough) "drivers" you have to create on your secret efi partition. This is all documented (https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/linux.html), but it's obscure. Very obscure. Then the first time you boot the partition, you have to pass the root location to it: "options root=/dev/sda4", in my case. After that it *remembers*. See what I mean? The hours I've spent learning to configure LILO. And this thing just remembers.

5) Almost home: CloverOS (https://cloveros.ga/) is great, but not really meant for this purpose. It boots into fvwm, which is very light on resources, but hard to use. You now need to get wpa_supplicant going, we have a gentoo guide for this, it's still hellishly hard with no internet. There's still a reason they call it supplicant. You have to pray to it. But then once it's going you can start to inhabit your new system. It's pretty neat as an install -- not having to use chroot at all! If you boot to the command line you need to remember to add "exec fvwm" to .xinitrc. Cloveros has a lot of options from there. It's binhost gentoo. Do *not* use the N option when doing your first update of world, it just spins into a world of pain. "emerge --sync && emerge -Dua @world" is what you want. Amazing how fast it goes.

6) There are a few packages CloverOS doesn't have on its binhost. You comment three lines in make.conf and emerge them the normal way, this does not hurt. It was xosview for me.

Cheers,

Jon.

[Banana]

I did something like that some time ago. I ended up with Linux Mint because I think compiling and building would be slow with gentoo.

What are your experience so far?
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[NeddySeagoon]

jesnow,

[Banana]

sneakernet, haven't heard this in a long time
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My personal space
My delta-labs.org snippets do expire

PFL - Portage file list - find which package a file or command belongs to.

[jesnow]

Quite right about sneakernet. Then you need all the packages you are going to need on your usb. Not so hard if you plan ahead. But once the network comes up everything gets so nice. I think instead of sneakernet I would go for a usb wired ethernet, which would most likely work right out of the gate.

[petr2008]

I have macbook air of about the same age. I tried ubuntu and it works without any problems. Proprietary drivers are there. However its slow and not much useful.