Contents

MacBook Pro(5,1) and (5,2) on Ubuntu 10.10(Maverick Meerkat)

MacBook Pro(5,1) and (5,2) on Ubuntu 10.10(Maverick Meerkat)

This page aims to describe the steps needed, to fully enable all features of the 5th Generation MacBook Pro (release date: late 2008, early 2009) when using Ubuntu 10.1, Maverick Meerkat.

IconsPage/terminal.png You can find out what model you have by typing at the terminal:

sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name

This should either return MacBookPro5,1 or MacBookPro5,2. If not, this page is not really so well suited for your situation. If you have a MacBook Pro, but a different hardware revision, please go to the MacBook Pro start page. If you have a different Intel CPU-based Macintosh product, go to the Mactel Community Help Pages to find the right wiki.

Overview

Anything not mentioned here probably already works out of the box. If not, please refer to the Ubuntu Apple Users forum.

Feature	Support status
Sensors (temps & fans)
Suspend & Hibernate
Reboot
Desktop Effects (Compiz)
HFS+ (only read)
CD/DVD Writing
Bluetooth
Screen brightness adjustment
Keyboard functions (Brightness, volume, etc)
Sound
Microphone
External Monitor
Wireless (AirPort)
Trackpad
Webcam/iSight
Apple Remote Control

IconsPage/ok.png (works out-of-the-box)
IconsPage/info.png (works, with remarks)
IconsPage/warning.png (needs manual install)
IconsPage/dont.png (won't work)
IconsPage/question.png (not yet documented)

Basic Installation Instructions

Common things about installing and maintaining Ubuntu on Intel-based Macs: Intel CPU-based Macintosh Generic Installation Instructions, but remember that rEFIT supports this MacBook only from 0.12. For 64Bit Ubuntu use rEFITt 0.14 or higher. Info rmation about rEFIt can be found at http://refit.sourceforge.net/

Package Support for Intel Macs

Install the modules from the MactelSupportTeam/PPA. Lucid Lynx kernel 2.6.32 has all that you need to make your MacBook Pro 5,1 work, but to make the buttons for keyboard backlight work you need to add this PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexmurray/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Then upgrade upower and gnome-power-manager and on reboot your keyboard backlight should work.

Boot/GRUB/Plymouth

Boot was nice the first boot for me, but i dist-upgraded from Lucid. x900)

Reboot

Not tested yet.

Suspend & Hibernate

Suspend is working out of the box felt pretty fast.

Hibernate not tested.

Wireless

STA drivers in the non-free Hardware drivers can be installed. You will need a wired Internet connection to do this. Go to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers. Select the Broadcom STA options and click enable.

Is the connectivity more stable than it was in Lucid?

Sensors

To enable all these sensors:

One motion sensor
Ambient light sensor
One fan sensor
16 temperature sensors

You have to edit /etc/modules:

gksudo gedit /etc/modules

And add at the end:

coretemp
applesmc

After a reboot (or modprobing the modules), they will be recognized. You can verify this by using

dmesg | grep apple

Output should be something like:

[  975.586518] applesmc: Apple MacBook Pro 5 detected:
[  975.586522] applesmc:  - Model with accelerometer
[  975.586524] applesmc:  - Model with light sensors and backlight
[  975.586526] applesmc:  - Model with 20 temperature sensors
[  975.587187] applesmc: device has already been initialized (0xe0, 0x00).
[  975.587189] applesmc: device successfully initialized.
[  975.588120] applesmc: 2 fans found.
[  975.590446] input: applesmc as /devices/platform/applesmc.768/input/input10
[  975.594503] applesmc: driver successfully loaded.

Unfortunately, none of the sensors have correct names. There is a legacy description suitable for other MacBook's at the old mactel-linux site with an (incorrect) sample sensors.conf at this mactel 2007 mail thread.

Add this to your sensors.conf or sensors3.conf file to provide context for some of the temperature sensors (this was generated on a MBP 5,2):

chip "applesmc-isa-0300"
    label "temp1" "TB0T Enclosure Bottom 0"
    label "temp2" "TB1T Enclosure Bottom 1"
    label "temp3" "TB2T Enclosure Bottom 2"
    label "temp4" "TB3T Enclosure Bottom 3"
    label "temp5" "TC0D CPU Diode"
    label "temp6" "TC0F CPU ???"
    label "temp7" "TC0P CPU Pin"
    label "temp8" "TG0D GPU Diode"
    label "temp9" "TG0F GPU ???"
    label "temp10" "TG0H GPU Heatsink"
    label "temp11" "TG0P GPU Pin"
    label "temp12" "TG0T GPU Transistor"
    label "temp13" "TG1H GPU 2 Heatsink"
    label "temp14" "TN0D Northbridge Diode"
    label "temp15" "TN0P Northbridge Pin"
    label "temp16" "TTF0 Unknown"
    label "temp17" "Th2H Heatsink 2"
    label "temp18" "Tm0P Memory Controller"
    label "temp19" "Ts0P PCI Express Slot Pin"
    label "temp20" "Ts0S PCI Express Slot (unk)"
    label "fan1" "Left Fan"
    label "fan2" "Right Fan"

chip "coretemp-isa-0000"
   label temp1 "Core0"

chip "coretemp-isa-0001"
   label temp1 "Core1"

Keyboard functions

Almost all keyboard functions work out of the box. The only exceptions I could find are the LED Backlighting controls and the Expose and Dashboard keys.

In order to have Ubuntu correctly recognize the keyboard backlight function, you have to add alexmurray's ppa and upgrade upower and gnome-power-manager:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexmurray/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Bluetooth

Pairing works out of the box. Beyond that, not tested.

If you have issues with Bluetooth, try to reset it with:

sudo hciconfig hci0 reset

If you want:

send file: launch Applications > Accessories > Bluetooth (bluetooth-applet)
receive file: set name and visibility with System > Preferences > Bluetooth (bluetooth-property) and launch Applications > Accessories > Bluetooth File Sharing (gnome-obex-server)

Remember that the system service Bluetooth device manager (bluetoothd) must be running in the background.

Note: Did not succeed to connect two computers or to browse a device yet!

Trackpad

Left-click, right-click (two finger)use and basic trackpad work out of the box. To enable two finger scrolling and tap to click:

System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad

Desktop Effects (Compiz)

You must enable the a non-free graphics driver to use Compiz. Go to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers and choose the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 190). It works on MacBook Pro, you will have to reboot after install.

External Monitor

Works.

Sound

Works out the box

Microphone

Works out the box

Make sure the microphone is not muted and has enough volume in:

System > Preferences > Sound > Input

Remote Control

No tested

Screen brightness adjustment

Works out of the box. See keyboard for changing the default operation of the function keys.

Known issues

Ubuntu gives you less than half of the battery time of macosX if you're lucky. No matter how much time put into tweaking power management. Some people claim efi booting can lower the requirements (since this exposes the 9400GT card for usage instead of the 9600) This is not my experience. The problem is it doesn't disable the 9600GT card when EFI booting. So even if you use the less power hungry card. Your 9600GT is still enabled and sucking your battery dry. You efi booting also makes you loose the capability to increase / decrease screen brightness in Ubuntu (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/153587) this is also true in 11.04 ye. Also EFI booting does not working on some 64-bit machines.(need bug report number)

However there is a way nowdays to disable the 9600 card with a tool called gpupwr when booted through efi mode. Check the ubuntu forums for it.

You can also modify the xserever configuration file.

If you would like to constantly enable powersave mode add :

Option     "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefault=0x3"

If you would like powersave only when using the battery, use this instead.

Option     "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2233; PowerMizerDefault=0x3"

Note that, although users have experienced drops of several degrees C, using this option will lower performance for graphics-intensive applications.

Enable laptop-mode

WARNING laptop-mode-tools in maverick breaks suspend completely. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/laptop-mode-tools/+bug/638307 for more information on this bug. Until that is resolved, installing laptop-mode-tools WILL disable suspend on your system. If you have installed it already and broken suspend, you can resolve the issue by doing

sudo aptitude install pm-utils

Which will remove laptop-mode-tools.

Some users have reported power savings from enabling laptop mode. To do so, make sure laptop-mode-tools is enabled

sudo aptitude install laptop-mode-tools

CategoryMac

IconsPage/users.png
The MactelSupportTeam is about to restructure and reorganize the documentation for Intel-based Macs. If you are interested in helping, please visit our team page for information. For all Mactel wikis, there is a starting place here. There is also a thread about planning the Mactel documentation going on.