Personally, I've always been a fan of good engeneering. Not so much having something that works reliably, although that's the main factor, but a combination of aesthetics, power and integration. Apple has always had a reputation for attention to detail, so when the time came to buy a laptop, I was already leaning towards getting a macbook.


So the obvious question is "Why pay extra to get a apple computer?" . Firstly, it's not that much more expensive than a similarly specced Lenovo machine, conversely if rumours are to be believed it runs linux considerably better, as well as having the integrated camera and microphone and looking impressive. Plus, it can run OSX if you ever decide to switch away.

So, how did it work. It works perfectly, aside from a few minor problems. Mostly it's annoyances with the controls, like not having a "delete" key or a right mouse button on the touchpad. On the other hand, graphics and sound worked perfectly out of the box and refit can dual boot without any problems.

So, how did you do it?

I used refit instead of boot camp, mostly because it was the first program I cam accross but also because I heard no mention of boot camp in the Debian install guide.

First step is to install refit in OSX. Just track down a .dmg file, mount and run. This was the first time I'd used OSX in my life and it took 5 minutes, don't worry about this step. Then you need to resize the OSX partition down to whatever size you expect to need. If you're not planning on using OSX in the future then 20GB is the size mentioned in the wiki. Once done, you can install Debian, or whatwever you want to run.

I'll be assuming you're using debian although it'll apply fairly equally to any distribution. To boot off a cd, the wiki instructs you to hold alt, this may not be necessary depending on your firmware, so says the internet rumour mill. In any case, you'll need a boot cd with a kernel that can handle the mac well enough to at least run the keyboard, this means the 2.4 series is right out, as is debian stable. You'll have to use etch when it goes stable or testing as of this article. Once you're booting, just install as normal, taking care to leave your previously existing partitions as they are. You might have problems placing all the partitions you want, if this is an issue that can't be solved with extended partitions, you'll have to boot with elilo off the MBR, then you can nuke the OSX partitions.

Conversely, I'll be assuming you want to keep them, probably to appease fanatical Mac-using friends you have. In either case, grub will fail to install properly but that's ok. Select lilo and get it installed to the main partition, not the mbr, then comes the tricky bit.

You'll have to alt-F2 into a console and download "resync" off the repositories of your distribution. Using this, you'll run it to synchronise your new partition tables with the way OSX thinks the partitions are, once done, you'll reboot into your new system. Odds are you have an intel 950 graphics chip, so everythng should work out of the box. Excepting camera and microphone. Wireless too for some reason.

Yeah, yeah, so how's it work?

Perfectly, almost. The machine's fast as lighting and looks awesome, just a few teensy problems, some stuff doesn't work.
* Camera
* Microphone
* Wireless (Wifi)

Although it should be noted that, for some reason, the bluetooth networking appears to be working perfectly.

Additionally, as I mentioned at the beginning, there's no right mouse button on the touchpad's controls and no delete key. While there ARE home, pgup, pgdwn and end keys, they need the "Fn" key to function properly, which doesn't come with the normal character set. Also, the eject key for the cdrom drive isn't mapped to anything although the drive itself works perfectly and is suitably impressive.

Although all the basic features work perfectly. So I'd definitely reccommend this hardware to anyone looking to buy a laptop. For my next desktop, I might get an apple as well. If I can find a model with a decent graphics card, something that can handle being rotated to work as a games console when it gets replaced.