This page is about installing Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) on MacBookPro 11,2, a 15-inch Mac laptop released in late 2013, which has a retina display, solid-state drive, and is based on Haswell Intel CPU. This page is based on the MacbookPro11,2 page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro11-1/Saucy.

You can find out the model identifider in MacOS by following http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4132 or in Linux by typing at the terminal:

sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name

Installation

0. If you want to keep the MacOS, boot into MacOS and use its Disk Utility to resize the MacOS partition to open up space for Ubuntu. (I would open up at least 25GB, with ~20GB for / and about 4-8 GB for swap.) Resizing MacOS partition during Ubuntu installation may damage your MacOS.
1. Download Ubuntu 13.10 NON-MAC 64-bit iso and put it onto a flash drive via Startup Disk Creator (or unetbootin). See Note 2 above for why not a "mac" iso.
2. Boot up your Mac with an OPTION key held, and select the EFI icon to boot the flash drive.
3. Select "Install ubuntu" in the grub screen, press "e" to edit the rule and add "nomodeset". Press F10 to continue.
4. Install ubuntu
5. Restart after installation and boot with the usb stick in "try ubuntu" and switch to Ctrl+Alt+F1 when booted

6. sudo apt-get install efibootmgr
   sudo efibootmgr

   You should see "ubuntu" is listed as Boot0000*. If you had booted into MacOS before installation, you should see two other boot entries, Boot0080* and BootFFFF* (these were created by MacOS), but the EFI BootOrder is 0080, which would make the laptop boot into MacOS only. To fix this, type

   sudo efibootmgr -o 0,80

   (If you had wiped out MacOS, then you only need to specify "0" instead of "0,80" in the command above.)
7. Reboot into your real OS (a command for reboot is "sudo reboot").
8. Again press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to the terminal because the screen will not work.

9. The solid-state drive will freeze periodically under the default kernel boot parameters. To prevent this, edit grub configuration file /etc/default/grub

   sudo nano /etc/default/grub

   to change the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line to:

   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="libata.force=noncq"

   Then save and update grub

   sudo update-grub

10. Reboot again in your real OS and to Ctrl+Alt+F1

11. Install the latest nightly kernel to fix the display drivers

    wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.13-rc8-trusty/linux-headers-3.13.0-031300rc8-generic_3.13.0-031300rc8.201401120535_amd64.deb
    wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.13-rc8-trusty/linux-headers-3.13.0-031300rc8_3.13.0-031300rc8.201401120535_all.deb
    wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.13-rc8-trusty/linux-image-3.13.0-031300rc8-generic_3.13.0-031300rc8.201401120535_amd64.deb
    sudo dpkg -i *.deb

12. Reboot again with "sudo reboot" and now you should have a desktop.