Macbook Air: hardware compatibility status

[gurth4ng]

Hello. I'm planning on buying a Macbook Air soon, and my plan is to be dual booting it with Leopard and Hardy.

Idealy i would like to turn this topic into a quick reference guide, showing the curent status of Macbook Air's hardware support, and links to pages/topics with useful information.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Macbook_Air seems to be covering everything, apart from the keyboard backlight which seems to be working after applying a patch (there is a post on the forum about it).

My question and poll is going to those that already have an Air and using it under Ubuntu;

how satisfied are you with your Air under Hardy?

[kosumi68]

Very satisfied :)

It took some tweaking initially, but for someone just about to install ubuntu, it should be quite smooth. Looking forward towards Intrepid, almost everything will work out-of-the-box.

I have not tried the SSD drive, though.

[Brightbelt]

HI, I have had a dual boot (Leopard/Hardy) on my Macbook Air for a while now. For one, I NEVER thought I'd be installing Ubuntu on any Mac, much less the Macbook Air.

I really am fairly satisfied with Hardy on the MBA. I have not worked with any HOWTO's yet on the back-lit keyboard.

I have, unsuccessfully however, tried to get the more advanced hand-swipe-type functions on the synaptics touchpad working. It could be my lack of expertise at the command line, but I am fairly experienced at following howto's.

Btw, I am using rEFIt in my dual boot setup and I'm extremely happy with it, so I would recommend using that.

Also, as you are probably already aware, getting the wireless up and running plus the sound takes a fair amount of tweaking.

My experience with the iSight camera is that it works right out of the box, but Cheese has a bug or something, so that program works only in a limited way.

That's all I can think of. Many Thanks, Frank B.

[cyberdork33]

getting wifi working is probably the most tricky part since you need to install packages to get it working and there is no ethernet jack. This is covered in the wiki though.

[kosumi68]

There seems to be some very recent progress on booting linux from usb sticks using grub2-efi; it might become of interest to you. It could mean a way of simplifying the initial wifi problems: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869324