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

[ChinaSailor]

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[markbl]

I just psyching myself up to try this install again but have some questions. The community wiki says to install rEFIt but I don't think this is necessary is it? I just used the OS X disk utility and split my main Mac partition in 2 leaving the new space spare and then the ubuntu installer seemed happy to partition that space as necessary. I prefer to keep things as simple so is that the recommended approach (granted that Bootcamp won't work which would be ideal)?

Also, I have not been through this entire thread but what "special notes" do I currently have to deal with. E.g. the first time I tried this last week I could not get the screen to work correctly but recent comments here imply that the fix for this is to disable the xorg-edgers ppa. Where was that ppa installed? It does not seem to be referenced in post-install-oneiric.sh?

I am happy to document my exact steps somewhere as I find that community wiki a bit of a hodge-podge of confusing references for different generation MBAs. My MBA is a current 2011 13" 256GB i5 with Samsung screen and Samsung SSD.

[poliva]

The community wiki says to install rEFIt but I don't think this is necessary is it?

I haven't tried without rEFIt, I guess it's not necessary but convenient to dual boot OS X and Ubuntu. Are you doing a pure-EFI install?

...disable the xorg-edgers ppa. Where was that ppa installed? It does not seem to be referenced in post-install-oneiric.sh?

It's installed by "fix-i915.sh", which is downloaded and executed from post-install-oneiric.

[poliva]

If you want to enable automatic keyboard brightness level, based on the ambient light sensor (just as OS X does), you can install lightum:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:poliva/lightum-mba
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lightum

I've put the source code on github:

https://github.com/poliva/lightum

[markbl]

I haven't tried without rEFIt, I guess it's not necessary but convenient to dual boot OS X and Ubuntu.

Can I ask why it is more convenient? I just did as I said above and could get a list of boot disks simply by pressing the option button at boot time. I can also change the default via the OS X "Startup Disk" setting. That's convenient enough for me and probably most.

Are you doing a pure-EFI install?

Don't really know what you mean but given the procedure I stated above then I guess that is "pure-EFI" as I just partitioned the disk via the OSX disk utility and then just ran the ubuntu installer from a USB drive. That's all.

I tried this ubuntu install a few days ago but gave up in frustration after the screen problem and re-partitioned my disk all back to OSX. I was away on holidays and only had dodgy 3G internet though. Now I am back home I may try again.

[khilman]

Trying to get an analog stereo headset with mic working on my MacBookAir4,1.

Stereo output to the headset works fine, but can't get the mic working (works fine in OSX.)

Under System Settings -> Sound, I have the 'Analog Stereo Duplex' profile selected. Going to the 'Input' tab, I have a choice of 4 connectors:

- Analog Line-in
- Rear Microphone
- Analog Microphone
- Internal Microphone

Using the last two, I get input working via the mic on the MBA, but none of them seem to select the headset mic.

Any ideas?

[hueythecat]

try running alsamixer from the command line

[khilman]

try running alsamixer from the command line

Tried that already, and verified the various capture inputs were all unmuted, and volumes raised. Didn't help.

I think the problem has do to with detection of a headset with mic in the headphones jack. When I plug in the headset with mic under OSX, it detects it and switches the input from 'internal microphone' to 'external microphone'. I suspect I just need to tell tne HDA intel driver to do the same, but don't know how.

[jaduncan]

Here comes a new challenger!

I have a machine that fails out on the fix-i915.sh script like so:

"ERROR: 'MacBookAir4,1/#@06' not recognized"

It is the new 11 inch Air with 256GB SSD.

What can I do to

a) make the display work, and;
b) what useful commands would the devs like me to copy the results of?

[dfacto]

Give us the output of

sudo get-edid 2>/dev/null

and attach

gzip -c /var/log/Xorg.0.log >Xorg.0.log.gz