STMA

Fedora 10 on a New MacBook

That’s right, folks, I’m running Fedora 10 on my shiny new MacBook 5.1… and you can too!! Here’s how to do it.

  1. Partition your harddrive with BootCamp. My harddrive is 160 gigs (yes, I bought the cheapest MacBook since it was all I could afford), so I shrank the Mac OS X HFS+ partition to 40 GB and left the rest for “Windows.” Note: don’t actually install Windows, just exit BootCamp once the partitioning is done.

  2. Install Fedora 10 as per the Fedora 8 instructions on mactel-linux.org. This includes installing rEFIt. I made partitions for / (40GB), /boot (200MB), /home (as big as possible), and swap (2GB). Unfortunately, the NetInstall CD doesn’t correctly identify the video card, so the installation and the rest of this configuration is all done in text mode. However, once the nVidia drivers from RPMFusion are installed, Fedora will automagically detect and configure the video card so the last reboot in this sequence should lead to a fully fuctional X session.

  3. [EDITED] Install extra repositories and other software as needed following my future post.

  4. Install the nVidia graphics drivers from RPMFusion (as root):
    yum install kmod-nvidia

  5. Install the Broadcom wireless drivers from RPMFusion (as root):
    yum install kmod-wl

  6. ???

  7. Profit!

As of right now, I don’t have the trackpad working to my satisfaction… the mactel-linux guides for Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 both claim to have the function keys and trackpad working just like they do in Mac OS X, but I can’t seem to get them functioning. pommed, the daemon to make MacBook function keys work, hasn’t been released/packaged for Fedora 10 yet, and I’m too lazy to build it from source. Also, for some reason I have no sound. Expect updates as this goes on.

However, Fedora 10 FTW!!!