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TC on Macbook Pro, notes

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curaga:
I had been looking for a good laptop/netbook for a while now. My targets would be nicely summed as a Via Nano touchscreen netbook, a Macbook Pro, or a recent Macbook (yeah, I want the backlit keyboard).

Some days ago I found a nice used MBP. It's a late-2006 model, 15", core2duo 2.16Ghz, Radeon X1600, and so on. A very nice laptop indeed, I've always liked Apple's hardware style.

I used OS X exactly long enough to play one chess match (I lost btw ;)), and use Boot camp.

Booted a TC 2.2 cd, installed jfsutils, filesystems, cfdisk and grub, and proceeded with my installation.

1. cfdisk /dev/sda
Set sda3 to type linux, toggle bootable flag on.

2. mkfs.jfs -L MyMBP /dev/sda3

3. grub installation, regularly to MBR

Reboot with alt pressed to test around, then a final boot to OS X to set TC as the default (hey, why press alt every boot when I will hardly use OS X):
sudo bless --device /dev/disk0s3 --legacy --setBoot --verbose

Install went fine, nothing special, no refit or other stuff necessary. My MBP now boots to TC by default, with a slightly remastered image for my keymap and JFS, and damn the boot is fast :D
I'm used to fast after a slow usb-load, booting TC from HD is damn, damn fast. I might shoot a video later, just to show off :P

So, on pure TC 2.2, what works and what doesn't:
- touchpad doesn't work
- video, keyboard, ethernet work fine
- no sound so far with OSS, I'll soon try alsa
- hd, cd have full speed

I'll add stuff here as I move on with this. iLike so far.

curaga:
- sound works using alsa
- ath9k says it recognizes the wireless, can't test right now
- Xorg gives nice full display, 1440x900

Now running a custom 64-bit kernel. Touchpad working in perfect condition, bootsplash, other stuff.

Edit: Forgot to say in the first post, but OS X left a rather mixed impression. On the other hand it was beautiful and logical, but it was _slow_. Doing anything takes a sec or two, or more. Opening a terminal takes long. Opening iTunes takes near 10 seconds. 'Course, all waiting is smooth and animated, but still. I guess I've been spoiled by TC running in RAM, seeing OS X as way too slow.

Heck, I haven't tried Windows in a while. I wonder how much worse it would look now.

alu:
slight off, but however your post makes me curious about the 64 bit kernel; can you shortly discribed what you did in order to get a 64 bit kernel running? thanks, i am looking for such a kernel for a new hp i got recently

curaga:
- alsa power saving produces a high-pitch whine when kicking in. I disabled this (added snd-hda-intel.power_save=0 to kernel boot line, because it is built in in my custom kernel)

@alu:
Sure, no problem. It wasn't that big a deal, all I did was build a TC-compatible (ie. loop-aes patched) 2.6.30.5 on a 64-bit box, then copied the resulting bzImage and modules.

No way of doing that on TC currently, it would require someone to build a full cross-compiling toolchain.

curaga:
One thing I like about these is the long battery life. Today I got 3+ hours playing music (mplayer-nodeps, headphones, mp3) on a used battery; not bad. The usual power savings were on: automatic cpu frequency via ondemand, wifi off, bluetooth off, screen off (via DPMS, which should save more power than just closing the lid), usb_suspend is automatic.

Oh, and as I now had a personal itch, watcher now supports battery ;)

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