Fedora 12 on a MacBook Pro 5,1

This is my guide to getting Fedora 12 Constantine running on a MacBook Aluminium 5,1 (I believe this should work on more recent generations as well because the only difference was the addition of the SD card slot and Firewire port). As a general note, this release of Fedora was much better than the previous for the MacBook Aluminium because more things worked out of the box.

NOTE: Obviously, this guide was written before the final release came out. I will be verifying these steps on a fresh install of the final release. In the meantime, I figured it would be useful for others.

Table of Contents:

PreStep
Video
Wireless
Touchpad
Sound
Function Keys
Keymapping
Webcam
Backlight
Keyboard Backlight
Power/Battery

Legend:
= Working out of the box (OBO)
= Working, but with comments
= Needs manual install
= Won’t work
= Not yet documented (TBD)

PreStep:

Gain internet access using a hard-wired Ethernet connection then install and enable the RPM Fusion repos for both the free and non-free packages which will get video and wireless working:
su
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-rawhid... && rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm

Apply all updates to the system:
yum upgrade
Yes, this step takes a bit of time, but it’s worth getting all the updated packages (less to fix).

Video:

TBD

The Nouveau drivers actually work out of the box, so nothing really needs to be done here, but if you want a better video experience including desktop effects (compiz), you’ll need to get the proprietary Nvidia drivers from the RPM Fusion repository.

Wireless:

yum -y install akmod-wl broadcom-wl kernel-PAE-devel
akmods --akmod wl
modprobe lib80211
modprobe wl
No need for restart, it should just work. If you’re having problems, try installing the kmod-wl package from the RPM Fusion website (nol onger there)
wget outdated link && yum install kmod-wl-5.10.91.9.3-3.fc12.2.i586.rpm

Should you need it… (Both claimed that they have already been installed with the download above for whatever reason…)
title="http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/development/i386/os/kmod-w...">http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/development/i386/os/kmod-w...
ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/development/ppc64/os/Packages/kernel-...

Source: http://codersifu.blogspot.com/2009/10/fedora-12-beta-and-broadcom-bcm4312.html

Touchpad:

The touchpad works out of the box, but if you’d like to have two finger scrolling and such, navigate to the mouse settings in the main menu and select the “touchpad” tab:
“System -> Preferences -> Mouse”

Just a side note, the “don’t tap while typing” doesn’t actually work. I’ll see if I can find a work around for this later… TBD.

Sound:

TBD

Sounds works out of the box for the external speakers, but not for the headphone jack.

Function Keys:

These are working out of the box, including the backlight and audio keys.

Keymapping:

If you’d like to customize the keys a little more to your liking (for example, swapping the command and control keys), please refer to this fedora forums post.

Webcam:

Works out of the box. Open “Cheese Webcam Booth” from “Applications -> Sound and Video” to see.

Backlight:

Works out of the box.

Keyboard Backlight:

TBD

The keyboard backlighting doesn’t work out of the box. I’ll see if there can be something done about this.

Power/Battery:

TBD

Actually, this is (of course) working out of the box, but I like to make a few observations after a few days worth of using the MacBook with Fedora. In previous releases, it seemed that it tends to run hot and the battery life isn’t as good as it would be in Mac OSX. I’ll report back in a few days after using it.

The original article can be found here.