MacBookAir4,1 & MacBookAir4,2 (MBA 2011) support

[jebus_beler]

In my case it last between 3 to 6 hours depending on usage, I'd say around 5 hours if you just do normal browsing + email activity (no flash, video playback, compiling, etc...).

Hi,

I just got a new macbook air 13" and I was originally planning to just wipe OS X in favor of ubuntu. On second thought, I'm vaguely considering keeping OS X around as a backup but was hoping to ask some questions to help me make up my mind:

- How does the power usage compare with OS X. This is the first time I'm using it but I seem to be getting a very decent 7+ hr battery life on OS X even on wifi and doing some work (installing apps, etc...). The system claims its using 890 mA at 7884 mV. Can anyone get similar figures for linux (when the system is idling)? I think the idle power usage is the easiest to compare and gives a good baseline for how power efficient the system is.

- How fast/stable is suspend/resume. My impression from browsing the thread is that this works well but a confirmation would be appreciated.

- Besides iffy touchpad support are there any other issues with linux on the MBA? On my old MBP linux had problems identifying the battery percentage and would often report an empty battery while this was definitely not the case.

- How much more painful is it to keep an OS X install around?

- Has anyone tried installing linux on an external SD card. From what I can tell in OS X's system profiler the reader is on a USB 2 bus so its not gonna be very fast but there are 128 GB SDXC cards out there so using it could greatly boost the system's capacity.

thanks!

[jonny]

- How does the power usage compare with OS X. This is the first time I'm using it but I seem to be getting a very decent 7+ hr battery life on OS X even on wifi and doing some work (installing apps, etc...). The system claims its using 890 mA at 7884 mV. Can anyone get similar figures for linux (when the system is idling)? I think the idle power usage is the easiest to compare and gives a good baseline for how power efficient the system is.

I get significantly worse battery life (c25%) on Ubuntu than on OS X. I've added some power optimisations to my boot parameters (these are described earlier in the thread), and my idle power usage with a fairly dim screen is around 1000mA. However, the Air has pretty good battery life and the power supply is pretty portable, so I'm not too unhappy.

- How fast/stable is suspend/resume. My impression from browsing the thread is that this works well but a confirmation would be appreciated.

It's pukka - slightly better than OS X, in my experience. I find that around 10% of resumes in OS X lead to an unresponsive touchpad - although this is easily sorted by opening and closing the lid. Suspend / resume has never failed for me under Ubuntu.

- Besides iffy touchpad support are there any other issues with linux on the MBA? On my old MBP linux had problems identifying the battery percentage and would often report an empty battery while this was definitely not the case.

Touchpad support isn't iffy at all. It's a little more sensitive to lightweight taps than under OS X, but, once you adapt your muscle memory, it's perfect. The only real quirk for me is that I can't work out how to remap the keyboard backlight keys, so I need a user-hostile root-user-only command line hack to turn the light on.

A secondary issue is that dfacto's keyboard mapping isn't quite right for a UK keyboard: the media keys and a few symbols, most critically the backtick ` character, are incorrectly mapped. I have a revised mapping file if anyone's interested, but it only works under GUI applications - a ctrl-alt-F1 terminal session leads me frantically hunting for the right buttons. It's on my to-do list.

- How much more painful is it to keep an OS X install around?

Just a few seconds extra on boot when REFIt kicks in - but I hardly ever restart, anyway - and a few lost GB off the SSD. OS X does have a couple of decent programs that make it useful to have around. My kids particularly like iMovie, for example.

- Has anyone tried installing linux on an external SD card. From what I can tell in OS X's system profiler the reader is on a USB 2 bus so its not gonna be very fast but there are 128 GB SDXC cards out there so using it could greatly boost the system's capacity.

Not tried, but, as you say, it would be slow; an SD card hanging out of the slot might offend the Apple aesthetic, too. I imagine it would work, though, as REFIt always offers to attempt to boot from any FAT32 SD card that's present at startup.

[jebus_beler]

Hi Jonny,

thanks a lot for all the info!

I get significantly worse battery life (c25%) on Ubuntu than on OS X. I've added some power optimisations to my boot parameters (these are described earlier in the thread), and my idle power usage with a fairly dim screen is around 1000mA. However, the Air has pretty good battery life and the power supply is pretty portable, so I'm not too unhappy.

That's manageable but kinda lame...will play around with it once installed and see if there's anyway to get a comparable battery life. That's one reason to keep OS X around -- to have a good baseline for how the machine can perform.

It's pukka - slightly better than OS X, in my experience. I find that around 10% of resumes in OS X lead to an unresponsive touchpad - although this is easily sorted by opening and closing the lid. Suspend / resume has never failed for me under Ubuntu.

Touchpad support isn't iffy at all. It's a little more sensitive to lightweight taps than under OS X, but, once you adapt your muscle memory, it's perfect.

So far I've had no such problems in OS X (insensitive touchpad) but its great to hear that its so good on ubuntu. Suspend/resume was one of the issues I had when running my MBP on linux (admittedly quite some time ago). A jittery trackpad was the other main issue (and vastly decreased battery life). I really don't need multitouch and all that stuff (at least I don't think I do but maybe its cause I haven't learned to play with it) but on my MBP I couldn't reproduce the balance between sensitivity and smoothness that OS X seemed to have.

[poliva]

The only real quirk for me is that I can't work out how to remap the keyboard backlight keys, so I need a user-hostile root-user-only command line hack to turn the light on.

weird, it's working for me with Fn + F5/F6 to change the keyboard backlight, and haven't done anything special to make it work.

[diafygi]

Help! I'm stuck in nomodeset after kernel update!

I was using Oneiric Beta2 (see my post), and the Update manager updated the kernel (to 3.0.0.12.14). When I restarted, I couldn't boot into the login screen without adding "nomodeset" to the grub launch (from step 17).

I tried running i915-fix.sh from dfacto, but it asks for "Assume -R". What does this mean? I've tried both the yes and no, but both still crash Ubuntu before the login screen.

Can anyone help getting back to normal?

[dfacto]

Help! I'm stuck in nomodeset after kernel update!

I was using Oneiric Beta2 (see my post), and the Update manager updated the kernel (to 3.0.0.12.14). When I restarted, I couldn't boot into the login screen without adding "nomodeset" to the grub launch (from step 17).

I tried running i915-fix.sh from dfacto, but it asks for "Assume -R". What does this mean? I've tried both the yes and no, but both still crash Ubuntu before the login screen.

Can anyone help getting back to normal?

Regarding the assume -R thing: rm -fr mba4-tmp/linux-3.0.0 (or whatever the directory is I can't remember off the top of my head)

[jonny]

Now that support for the MacBook Air 4,2 and 4,1 seems to be reasonably stable, I've updated the wiki with reasonably detailed and, hopefully, novice-friendly instructions. If anyone can see any obvious howlers, please correct my efforts or let me know so that I can make the requisite changes.

[dfacto]

Way-to-go Jonny! Very nice! Thanks!!!!

[dfacto]

Does isight now work out-of-the-box? I think it probably still needs the steps in the script, no?

sensors work from applesmc driver (out-of-the-box). To format sensor data requires lm-sensors. I updated the wiki to reflect this.

[jonny]

Does isight now work out-of-the-box? I think it probably still needs the steps in the script, no?

It works from a live USB session for me.