When I first got my macbook back in december, nearly the first thing I did after getting OS X all set up with applications and stuff was to make room for linux. About two days later, I was taking linux off because at the time, it couldn’t handle two things that are essential: suspend to ram and wireless.
Every now and then, I take a bit of time to download a live cd of a distribution and give it the macbook another go around on linux. This time I went for Kubuntu Gutsy Tribe 5. I didn’t try the wireless, but i did try suspend to ram. I was pretty atonished (and pleased) when:
suspend to ram actually worked from the live cd
I almost didn’t believe what I was seeing. Put the laptop to sleep (used ‘echo “mem” > /sys/power/state’ or whatever it is), let it sleep for a few minutes, woke the laptop back up, and everything came back, even the X display with the backlight.
Clear one hurdle for linux on my macbook. Now I need to try the wireless. Maybe I’ll do that this weekend.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Morten Sjoegren // Sep 13, 2007 at 7:00 am
Wireless on my macbook (white first generation, Core Duo) works out-of-box with both feisty and gutsy. But I havn’t got suspend to ram (or disk) to work. The machine goes black and the tiny white LED on the front flashes, but it won’t wake up. How did you wake yours?
2 Francesco // Sep 13, 2007 at 10:11 am
Have you tried Sabayon Linux? It has pretty good hardware recognition. Have it installed on my other laptop and wanted to try it on my MacBook, too. Haven’t got around to do it yet, though.
3 mattr // Sep 13, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Morten: Mine is a second gen Core 2 Duo laptop, which could be the different. To wake it, I just hit the power button.
Francesco: I’ll keep Sabayon in mind the next time I go trying out distros on my macbook. The problem with the wireless is that the wireless chip is a draft N chip and there’s no open source driver for it. The last time I tried ndiswrapper, it basically hard locked my machine and I’d prefer a more open solution anyways.
4 Morten Sjoegren // Sep 14, 2007 at 12:17 pm
mattr: That’s most likely the reason. Then I click on the power button, the front led stops flashing and the DVD makes a sound, but the screen is just blank and the fan is still silent.
Thank you for your reply.
5 Zak Nicola // Nov 26, 2007 at 4:58 pm
I have a 2nd Gen (Black :D)Core 2 Duo. I had no prob with suspend to RAM. Wireless is another headache that I don’t have to time to work out. Have you got this to work Matt?
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