Arch Linux on MacBook Pro Retina 2014

http://loicpefferkorn.net/2015/01/arch-linux-on-macbook-pro-retina-2014-with-dm-crypt-lvm-and-suspend-to-disk/

by loicp • 12 years ago

235 145 12 years ago

loicpefferkorn.net

seyz3• 12 years ago

Nice job. I'm running on Archlinux on a Mac Book Air 2014.

The only thing that doesn't work is my webcam. Does yours work?

ter0• 12 years ago

The iSight cameras are now PCIe rather than USB, and no drivers exist for them yet as far as I'm aware. There is some more information on the kernel.org bug tracker[1], and there's also an ongoing attempt to reverse engineer one on GitHub[2].

[1]https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71131

[2]https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie

loicp10• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing, I will add a section about the webcam.

crocowhile• 12 years ago

how is battery life and how does it compare to macos?

seyz3• 12 years ago

The battery life is perfect for me. It's hard to compare to macos because I don't use it ^^

oahziur2• 12 years ago

How is the stability of wifi?

seyz3• 12 years ago

Everything works very well. The stability is perfect.

Nexxxeh• 12 years ago

The author asks for language corrections on his documentation.

English is not my native language, corrections and fixes will be greatly appreciated.

There's nothing really bad that I could see. No potentially ambiguous instructions at least.

Two typos ("Thunderbold" and "actuel"), a missing "to" ("on a second USB") and a spurious "s" ("informations"). What's the best way to provide the feedback?

Edit: Looks like submitter is author, so this may be a solved problem.

loicp10• 12 years ago

Fixed, thank you for taking the time to report the typos !

RexRollman2• 12 years ago

Also, you have the work "partitionning". I believe that should be "partitioning".

jkot• 12 years ago

Nice list, I liked part about powertop.

BTW I would like to see similar list howto install OSX on Thinkpad.

bithush• 12 years ago

Maybe I am just getting old but in 2015 it shouldn't be this much work to get an OS installed on a computer. Getting pretty much any Linux or Windows installed on my ThinkPad is a piece of cake. As pretty as a Bacbook Pro is I just don't have the time for this kind of thing anymore.

#GetOffMyLawn ;)

wampus2• 12 years ago

Same here. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to come by older machines where installation is a breeze. Most support HD displays and some might even handle 4K.

But I'm really grateful for posts like these that document the issues with cutting edge hardware, so they might be resolved by the time I'm pulling the machines of the scrap pile for recycling. Some of my old workhorses had terrible problems with drivers when they were current, but now they Just Work.

carlosrg• 12 years ago

I have Fedora 21 on my MacBook Air and it was just insert the Live USB, click install, reboot and done ;)

Arch has always been more complicated, regardless of the computer.

DanBC• 12 years ago

I have Fedora 20 on my 2009 MacBook Pro and it was a pig to install.

fernandotakai• 12 years ago

I installed Arch on my mid-2012 mbp and it was quite painless. the only thing that did not work out of the box was wireless, but after installing proprietary drivers, it worked.

even multihead worked without issues, which made me quite impressed.

jmspring• 12 years ago

I moved over to Mac/oSX years ago from Linux and FreeBSD because I was done dealing with tinkering with things I didn't care about tinkering with -- getting things to work -- wireless, multiple monitor support, etc. I've been more productive since.

I still use both for vms for projects, but minimized my system administration headaches.

alvaromuir• 12 years ago

Agreed. I'm too old to worry about drivers and compiling kernels. it's exciting when you are a young hacker/tinkerer. Now I just need to get work done. OS X basically 99% perfect for me. Most unix stuff compile no problem, and the OS is free.

babuskov• 12 years ago

I agree. I used Linux exclusively from 2006 up until this year. In that period I ran Slackware, Fedora, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Gentoo for at least 3-4 months each, but mostly stick to Slackware. I got tired of problems when compiling some basic software. For example getting Workrave and Inkscape to work on Slackware always took me 1-2 days to figure out which exact version of which package to install. So I finally switched to Ubuntu (14.04) once again, got almost bitten by automatic update which seemed like it got stuck, but actually did not and was upgrading kernel and Grub. Luckily I ran "ps ax" trying to reboot and noticed the grub install command. I imagine average user would not be so lucky.

Some other stuff also randomly would not work, like wifi or printer and reboot would fix that, but I got so tired of it. Doing other stuff like screencasts, simple video editing, etc. is cumbersome or almost impossible on Linux.

About a month ago I got MBP, planned to install Linux on it, but got stuff I need working easily in OSX and discovered that I'm way more productive than before (hello Brackets and iMovie). I just decided to postpone Linux install for now (maybe permanently). I still got some confusion with MacPorts vs Homebrew for example, but I'm already up and running faster than I was ever on Linux.

After 8 years of tinkering with Linux I decided there's better use of my time.

I still use Linux for servers and never plan to change that.

_delirium• 12 years ago

I have kind of mixed opinions on that part. I also run OSX largely for those reasons, but it's been quite frustrating in some ways that Linux isn't. The good is that many things do often "just work": wifi, multiple monitors, sleep, etc. And the power management is good. The bad is that if something doesn't work, it's much harder to debug, and the support is much worse. Everything feels very opaque and inscrutable in comparison to the Linux world.

Example: I had a recurring issue on a MacBook Pro after upgrading from 10.6.x to 10.9.x where some process called 'systemstats' would balloon to taking 4gb of RAM or so, usually for about an hour. This was triggered by all sorts of things, from the daily Spotlight indexing, to clicking on the power display on the top/right menu bar (essentially anything that invoked systemstats would cause it to go haywire). Looking around the internet, some other people had the issue, and had all sorts of possible ways to fix it, with no solid confirmation from Apple of anything, and fixes that didn't work. So it was trial and error, things like manually deleting some BerkeleyDB files to see if that'd solve the problem, someone even suggesting resetting PRAM, whatever that means. Eventually I settled on writing a script that just did a 'killall systemstats' every 5 minutes. Huge hack, but fixed the symptoms.

That way of debugging problems really sucks compared to what I was used to from previously running Debian. There, you either file a bug or find an existing bug, which serves as a central clearinghouse where people really try to determine the root cause of the problem and fix it. Apple doesn't really do anything like that, so you end up reading a bunch of disorganized threads on random mac forums, hoping someone has a diagnosis/fix.

oahziur2• 12 years ago

I am using Mac OS for my Macbook because I tried several times to configure different version of Linux on Macbook, but I failed. Especially the support for retina display was poor. Right now, I am using Linux only on my desktop at home and work. The only thing that I think I really miss in Mac OS, is a good tiling window manager, such as, i3wm and Xmonad.

a1a• 12 years ago

It's like when you are buying a new suit.

You have the mass produced suits that sort of fits you. They are not designed for your needs, they are designed to (almost) fit as many people as possible.

Then again if you want something customized for your needs -- that really looks great on you -- you will have to hire a tailor. This will take some time. No matter what year it is.

darren0• 12 years ago

After running Linux on MacBooks for the past 5 years I would strongly recommend against it. The basics usually work fine but you are constantly dealing with issues. Each MacBook revision introduces some new issue. For example the webcam recently switched from being usb attached to being attached to the PCI bus and Linux doesn't have drivers yet. Other things like GPU switching, multi monitor, display brightness, all have quirks.

Just recently I gave up getting MacBooks to work with Linux and went back to ThinkPads and I couldn't be more happy. Granted you can still buy ThinkPads that have similar issues as the MacBooks. The difference is that you can find a ThinkPad (or some other brand) that works practically flawlessly. With the current line of MacBooks, not a single one doesn't have huge issues (like the webcam).

progman• 12 years ago

Which ThinkPad models work flawlessly for you?

peatmoss• 12 years ago

Not a high-end machine, but my wife recently got an x140e for peanuts (< $300 for the laptop during the XMas season sales, plus ~$150 to upgrade to an SSD + 8 GB RAM). She was upgrading from a Chromebook and decided that Linux fit her immediate use case better than Windows. My only guidance in this was, "plug in an ethernet cable during installation."

Every single piece of hardware--touchpad, sound, webcam, suspend, wifi, etc.--worked out of the box.

This machine is solidly built, and reasonably attractive. I'd say the thing that dropped the price was its weight. Functionally, it's easily a replacement for my MacBook Air or better. Physically, it's like three MacBook Airs stacked on top of each other.

Sorry, forgot to mention linux distro. She is running stock Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. Unity might get some hate from some segments, but seeing a novice user take to it with zero guidance was illuminating to me.

davidy123• 12 years ago

I've install Linux (typically Ubuntu) on an x60, x220, t400s, and now t530 and everything (except the fingerprint reader, which I don't care about) worked out of the box. Lenovo even mentions Linux in their material, which means a lot and is worthy of support.

dagar• 12 years ago

Any X or T series with intel video tends to work pretty well. I've personally had great results with Ubuntu on a T410, T420, T520, T530, X1, X60 in the last few years.

saosebastiao2• 12 years ago

I recently bought a T420 for $300. After upgrading my ram to 8G and the stock hard drive to a samsung SSD, the laptop is easily a better overall laptop than my wife's MacBook Pro.

I'm running Ubuntu, although I may switch to Arch soon, but I haven't had any problems with drivers in Ubuntu and would imagine the same would go for Arch. So far, the only relative downsides compared to the MBP have been:

1) Battery life, although mostly fixed with TLP[a]

2) Keyboard quality...sometimes feels like some keys have more resistance than others

3) Screen contrast. My wife's MBP isn't a retina, but it still has much better resolution and contrast.

[a] http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-man...

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

T530 here. Works flawless. Everything, from the function keys, to the webcam, to the fingerprint reader.

kh_hk• 12 years ago

With the X220, you can get a beefy i7 full of ram quite cheap on ebay. Not as happy as with the X60, but the upgrade was worth it.

xorcist• 12 years ago

Have had the T40, T60, X60 and X220. Suspend many times per day. No issues ever, except with fans and hard disks dying on me. Built like tanks.

pizza234• 12 years ago

I had, and all worked flawlessly: a X201s, a W520, and a Helix. I think that for a few weeks I even worked full-time on the X201s with Hackintosh.

tbrock2• 12 years ago

Basically all of them. Linux loves thinkpads. I've personally run it on an old 770ED, T41P, T60, X301, and X1 Carbon flawlessly over decades.

binky• 12 years ago

Not all models are seamless in ThinkPad land. My X240 has Realtek wireless and it refused to work with any kernel earlier than 3.16 (Ubuntu < 14.10). Recognized on recent ones, but can't resume from Suspend.

rakel_rakel• 12 years ago

I'm currently running arch on an x240, and it works perfectly. I have also had really good experiences with x1 carbon (v2), x220 and x201.

I've ran several different distros on macbooks too, mostly flavours of debian/ubuntu, but also arch and gentoo. In my experience it's all about the amount of work you're willing to put in, but you can defenitely more often than not, get a good setup running on macs(least the machines I tried it on).

The silver lining of getting arch to run on a machine that's not really "plug and play" is that you get to learn a lot of it's internals during install. I would recommend it to anyone with an intrest in linux desktop systems :)

Eldandan• 12 years ago

T61 on Xubuntu 14.10 working great! Like others though, there is always a 'but':

-correctly installed and configured Thinkfan to control fan speed. The default is a bit annoying.

gcb02• 12 years ago

Which ThinkPad models work flawlessly for you?

top of the line T models and some X models.

anything else is worse than the cheapest toshiba or acer.

if you doubt, buy yourself an E series for example. Lousy flimsy plastic quality, and all the corner cutting for costs that you find in an apple (like soldered RAM, devices changing bus based on what they found cheap on the market at that month, etc)

JosephRedfern• 12 years ago

I've not experienced any issues running Ubuntu (and Debian, as you'd expect) on both the T430 and the X230

fit2rule6• 12 years ago

All of these issues can change - by people running Linux on their Macbooks, encountering the issues you describe - and then, scratching the itch and fixing the problem.

But of course, unless someone actually tries, the itch never arises.

So your discouragement could be interpreted as an attempt to reduce the effectiveness of Linux on the Macbook platform. Why would you actually encourage that?

sroerick4• 12 years ago

Maybe he doesn't want to spend his time or his energy needlessly tinkering with a system for which the manufacturer doesn't give a damn about supporting linux, despite having used the code to build their own, proprietary operating system.

All these issues could also be solved if Apple opened up their hardware. We would also collectively have many more hours to develop other FLOSS software. Why are you putting the onus of blame on OP?

anoonmoose• 12 years ago

The number of people who might like to run Linux on their Macbook is a pretty small number, all things considered, but it's absolutely gigantic compared to the number of people who could possibly fix the types of problems described in the parent.

marincounty• 12 years ago

I see you're being down voted? I have been looking for an open alternative to Apple's operating system for about two years now. I am no computer wizard. I consider myself an average computer user. Yes--I know a little bit about the command line, can put up static websites, but I am an average user; not advanced. I like Apple, but I want a computer that I can plug an external device in, and with a little coding; I can get it to work. I have always had a hard time with tweaking Apple's operating system. I know they are suspose to be locked down, but I find I just don't use my Apple products, besides the Ipad, for most of my projects. I end up using a 10 year old Toshiba. I'm not upset with Apple--just tired of updating operating systems--then some programs and externals stop working. I don't like agreeing to 56? pages of legal stuff-- I don't read on Itunes.(Actually, I can't download from Itunes because I refuse to agree to that to the terms & conditions because it is 56 pages) Why do I own two Apple computers--I acccepted them in barter for services. So call me stupid, but I have been passively waiting for an simple to use operating system not tied to Apple, but uses that beautiful hardware. And no, I don't dislike Apple; I'm just not the fan I was a few years ago. Yes--It's a grest company. These are just my, probally off base, thoughts. (Who would thought I would actually be concerned about the backlash from a post? I used to never back down from a physical fight; now I don't want to be beat up online--yea, I'm getting old.)

redthrow5• 12 years ago

In addition to Thinkpads, I would recommend Acer C720 which costs around $200 and everything works out of the box because a dedicated developer created distros just for C720.

https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/12/

If you are not a gamer this is a perfect machine for Linux users.

I really like this distro-per-hardware approach because people don't have to duplicate efforts in hunting for and following complex and lengthy tutorials and applying fixes.

scrollaway3• 12 years ago

I'd also like to recommend the UX* line of ultrabooks from Asus. They range from decently-priced to fairly expensive and they are absolutely fantastic. They all work flawlessly on Linux (though I did not test the touchscreen from UX303LN on Linux yet).

They are also really nice laptops. Similar feel to the Macbook Air. (I do not work for Asus)

heywire2• 12 years ago

I can also recommend the C720, I'm typing this comment from one. I am also running Arch, which is a perfect match for this machine with its minimal nature. This machine is small, lightweight, and the battery seems to outlast me most days. My only real complaint is with the limited amount of RAM (I have the 2GB model), since it isn't upgradable. I recently tried to launch Android Studio without a swapfile active, and let's just say that was an exercise in patience that eventually resulted in a hard reboot :). I did find the shiny display bezel a bit distracting, so I popped it off and sprayed it a similar color to the laptop body.

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

+1 got the c720 with i3 CPU, for traveling. Upgraded SSD to 128GB, had to use distroshare pre-made ubuntu image. So far so good. Even started to use it instead of my Thinkpad T60, around the house.

gcb02• 12 years ago

i despise buying something as closed as an apple, but suggesting a 720p screen today is bad.

JohnBooty3• 12 years ago

Wow, thanks. I think I'm going to pick one of those up.

alelos• 12 years ago

Just to share a different point of view.

I have the c720 with arch installed. There are some problems, mainly the GPU lock https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83677#c102 The bug is fixed in the 3.19rc kernel.

My main problem was the very bad build quality of the laptop it self. I'm used to mechanical keyboards, I never got used to the c720 one.. The screen is also really bad. Given the price tag it's hard to complain though.

I finally put chromeOS back and gave the laptop to my SO. I got a used x220 in perfect condition for a bit more of the c720 asking price. I replaced the screen with a new IPS bought from ebay. Best linux laptop I ever had.

Diederich• 12 years ago

I also started running Linux on macbooks in 2009, three of them so far. I get them from the companies I've been working for.

In general, I agree with you. It can be challenging, but as long as you don't have the bleeding edge macbook, the latest Ubuntu tends to work pretty well.

The 2014 macbook pro I'm using now has everything working on Ubuntu 2014 LTS except suspend and the thunder bolt ports for video.

Those are kind of a big deal, but I don't need them and I really like to run Linux on the exceptional mac hardware, so I take the hit.

When I do need to project a presentation, I just boot it into OSX. Again, that might not work for most, but I'm fine with it. I just really like to run Linux on the bare metal mac hardware.

kayoone• 12 years ago

Sounds like a lot of compromises in daily usage just to be able to run Linux. I'd much rather put up with OSX, which i find is a rather compelling development platform but also has it's shortcomings of course.

cgb_2• 12 years ago

FWIW, I've been using linux on desktop/laptops for 16 years, and for last 1 1/2 years, I've been running Linux (Fedora, awesomewm) on VMware Fusion, on OSX, on a Macbook Air 2013 (June), and it's the smoothest Linux laptop experience I've ever had.

When you think about it, all I'm doing is abstracting the hardware to a hypervisor, and the OS that hypervisor is hosted on is responsible for all hardware management. I continue to get 10-14 hour battery runtime, never ever had a failed suspend/resume, and every single hardware component is fully supported.

Barely any other laptop can compare to it for battery life and the hardware itself is the best laptop experience I've had (although I do miss my 'pointing stick' from Toshiba or IBM/Lenovo gear). I'm surprised more people haven't suggested this.

rifung• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing; I think I may have to consider this for my next upgrade!

veidr• 12 years ago

I've been doing this for years, too. The huge advantage is that you can update your MacBook to the latest version frequently, without having to deal with all the pain points the GP describes.

The same benefits accrue even more so for Windows; not because of hardware incompatibility (there are Windows drivers for all Macbook hardware) but because of system decrepitude. I have never had a physical machine that booted Windows for 7 years (or even 2 years) that didn't become hopelessly fucked up, whether due to installing some weird open source thing, malware, or Windows Update.

But I have had the same 3 Windows VMs (XP, 7, and 8.1) running since the day I installed Windows on them, albeit with significant help from my frequent use of VMWare Fusion's snapshot feature.

The only big drawback is graphics performance -- if you want to play games I don't think you would be happy with the solution, but it works great for virtually any other usage.

metapunk• 12 years ago

I do the same and also have a wonderful experience with Fedora running as a guest in VMware Fusion on a Macbook Pro Retina.

tmandry• 12 years ago

Last time I tried VMWare Fusion (<1yr ago) I was pretty disappointed with the trackpad support (I could find absolutely no way to get horizontal scrolling, for example, and vertical scrolling was extremely jarring). Maybe it doesn't bother you, but it drove me nuts.

Scarbutt• 12 years ago

Are you productive using only the laptop or do you use a external monitor with it?

imsofuture• 12 years ago

I've been running Ubuntu (12.04+14.04)+NixOS on my Macbook Air with zero issues for the past ~2 years.

(Oh, suspend doesn't work, but my laptop is plugged in 99% of the time, and I haven't undertaken any effort to make it work.)

That said, I do plan on buying a not-Macbook next time around.

dima55• 12 years ago

Hi. FYI "suspend doesn't work" is a major issue on a laptop.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

I personally have had a good experience buying a LC2430E from LinuxCertified.com, which sells laptops with Linux pre-installed (for no additional fee) and, as an option, dual-booting with Windows (for an additional fee which can't be much more than the cost of a Windows license, from what I saw).

http://www.linuxcertified.com/

I mean, as long as we're doing product reviews.

espeed• 12 years ago

The new 2015 edition of the Dell XPS 13 and XPS 15 laptops are coming out in February with Ubuntu 14.04...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2015-dell-refreshes-high-en...

You can select Ubuntu for the OS here, but the estimated ship date is Jan 29, 2015...

http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9530/fs

wyclif2• 12 years ago

Why not do what a lot of devs do now, which is run OS X on the MacBook and run Linux in a VM?

benaiah2• 12 years ago

Not OP, but that setup drastically reduces battery life and performance, since you're running two OSes at the same time.

neillyons• 12 years ago

There are a couple problems with running Linux on MacBook Pro's but I wouldn't recommend against it. I think if you like Linux go for it :)

My mid 2010 MacBook Pro is setup to dual boot OSX and Crunchbang Linux. In the past I had Ubuntu setup as the Linux OS, but I switched to the Openbox window manager when Ubuntu opted for Unity as the desktop environment. Openbox comes preconfigured on Crunchbang. Really nicely done. http://crunchbang.org/

I use Linux about 99% of the time on this laptop and have done since 2010. The only real problem is battery life. It isn't as good as OSX. I get about 2 hours.

As well as being great hardware it is nice to boot into OSX to run programs that aren't available on Linux.

I'm really happy with this computer. I've had it for about 4 1/2 years and I think I'd be happy to use it for another 2 or 3 years.

apricot• 12 years ago

A friend gave me an older Macbook Air (3,1) recently. I installed Linux Mint LTS on it, completely replacing MacOS (no dual-boot). Everything just works, you name it: wifi, webcam, sound, suspend. The only hard part was understanding that the nvidia driver is not compatible with EFI mode, and needs the legacy BIOS mode.

wampus2• 12 years ago

Instead backing up the raw disk with dd, you can create a USB installer in OS X. The trick is to download Yosemite from the App Store and prevent it from running. There are plenty of articles describing the process. If you also have data to preserve, connect an external disk and do a Time Machine backup. If anything goes wrong, you can reinstall OS X from scratch and restore your data (and even restrict the size of your OS X partition so you don't have to resize it again).

floatboth• 12 years ago

I'd like to install FreeBSD on my MacBook Air. Unfortunately, Broadcom Wi-Fi. Still no driver.

tbrock2• 12 years ago

I never understood BSD on laptops. It's like oil and water.

The realm of many things BSD is great at does not include power management or hardware support so you will be guaranteed to be unhappy with it.

suprjami• 12 years ago

I have made several Broadcom-equipped laptops more Linux friendly by installing an Intel wifi card. They go for about 20 or 30 bucks on eBay. I don't know if the MBA has replaceable components like that though.

ctrlfreak• 12 years ago

great lesson. there has to be a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer.

dsqrt• 12 years ago

I have the same machine as the author of this post and I have been wondering about installing Linux on it for quite some time. I was wondering: wouldn't it be simpler to use virtualization (no problems with the hardware, ease in sharing data between Linux/OS-X no need to partition the disk and so on)? What am I missing?

loicp10• 12 years ago

Why not, but which virtualization software to use? I can see the advantages, but what about the drawbacks? Does someone using a virtualized Arch Linux system under Mac OS X is willing to share?

ratsimihah• 12 years ago

Great post!

re "You can leave me a tip for hosting fees, thank you :)":

There are 10000 free alternatives to host your blog. Look into Jekyll+Github pages for example.

loicp10• 12 years ago

To be more precise, I rent a dedicated server for personal hosting. But to be fair, I have modified this sentence, it's not logical to ask money for something you can find for free. And I'm already convinced by static site generator, because I'm using Hugo.

robbles2• 12 years ago

Totally unrelated to the subject matter, sorry:

what is the service that generates the author's picture on the top left? I've been seeing them a lot lately and I don't really understand why people use them in place of a real photo.

robbles2• 12 years ago

Looks like it's www.faceyourmanga.com.

loicp10• 12 years ago

I confirm.

tuananh• 12 years ago

Getting an OS on a laptop shouldn't be this much trouble.

cmurf2• 12 years ago

A big part of the complexity is inherent to dual-boot. Dual-booting Macs is a touch more complex than the usual because the firmware is "Apple EFI" not UEFI and not legacy BIOS, and no firmware setup. Next Arch has only recently developed a GUI installer. Several distros have mature GUI installers. So the trouble is partly about the choices made. Even OS X + Windows dual boot quickly gets really complicated if you want to do anything that Apple doesn't directly support in Boot Camp Assistant.

akacase• 12 years ago

Dell Latitude E4300 with OpenBSD.

cmurf2• 12 years ago

Core Storage volumes can be resized with 'diskutil cs resizevolume' even if they're encrypted. It's not documented in the diskutil man page, and thus probably not supported. I've done this maybe a dozen times and on one of those attempts it totally imploded the file system and couldn't be salvaged - so it works most of the time but a backup is still wise.

shawn-butler• 12 years ago

I don't think I would trust for very long any system spitting out those ATA errors.

The interrupts are also probably the cause of the abnormally high kworker CPU usage.

edcastro2• 12 years ago

Why use powertop instead of tlp? I've been using tlp on my macbook for a few months and everything works smoothly. Good battery life and suspend works perfectly using all tlp related programs (tlp, tlp-sleep, tlp-rdw). :)

edcastro2• 12 years ago

Also, forgot to mention, the SATA issues is fixed on Linux 3.18. Or you might want to disable NCQ while you dont upgrade with libata.force=1:noncq

http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ide/msg49716.html

loicp10• 12 years ago

Thanks, I will add the pointer.

loicp10• 12 years ago

Because I wasn't aware of tlp :) Thank you for sharing. By the way I'm very happy by the feedback generated by this thread, thank you guys!

shpx• 12 years ago

lvcreate --extentes 100%FREE -n root vgcrypt

unrecognized option '--extentes'

I think you meant '--extents'

loicp10• 12 years ago

Fixed, thanks for the report.

insaneirish3• 12 years ago

As an academic exercise, bravo. As a practical matter, articles like this boggle my mind.

I really struggle to find a single reason how Linux makes sense on a laptop in 2015 as a primary OS when OS X is an option.

If you feel that strongly about running a Linux desktop, just do it in a VM.

po1nter• 12 years ago

* OSX is NOT Linux * OSX is not free * OSX is not Open Source

kolinko• 12 years ago

"Free" as in FSF? No, but free as in "costless" - yes it is.

insaneirish3• 12 years ago

* OSX is NOT Linux

Is this sportsball? Glad we're picking teams.

* OSX is not free

Not really concerned with a Richard Stallman view of the world, nor am I about the semantics of free vs. free.

* OSX is not Open Source

Parts of it are. And I fully support the rights of companies to distribute which parts of their own projects that they deem necessary.

* OSX * OSX * OSX

Actually, it's OS X.

loicp10• 12 years ago

If you have any feedback regarding running Arch Linux in a VM under Mac OS X, I would be glad to hear about it, I'm just curious about the drawbacks.

thejosh• 12 years ago

Because OSX workflow is bad? I use a MBA2013, as I'm wanting to work with iOS, and my desktop 99% of the time is Ubuntu with XFCE with works great (I don't use the webcam, and the ethernet doesn't hotplug, but I've used ethernet once in the time I've owned this device).

Not everyone likes Mac, Linux or Windows - why can't they just use what they want to use?

insaneirish3• 12 years ago

Because OSX workflow is bad?

Not sure what that means.

Not everyone likes Mac, Linux or Windows - why can't they just use what they want to use?

They can! Choice is great! But I genuinely--honestly--do not understand that choice in 2015.

Arch Linux on MacBook Pro Retina 2014

Related Stories