damn it! well, let us know your results.. i'm waiting to see how well Linux is supported to decide between buying a MBA or going for a Vaio Z series
damn it! well, let us know your results.. i'm waiting to see how well Linux is supported to decide between buying a MBA or going for a Vaio Z series
Yeah, me too - until I had the Z on-hand in a store. It just felt like cheap plastic, and it's SOOOO expensive I hate Apple more than any other company, and I feel like showering having ordered the MBA, but here I am. It's just so effing desirable. I'm gonna spray-paint tux on the lid eating that glowing apple, that's for sure... It's just... Argh! I hate that I just bought the MBA, but I'm also really glad I did. You know?
I have a VAIO TX3, which I bricked, in my closet - it's a really neat machine. But it's plasticky, and I'm not going back to Sony unless they start making machines that feel like what they cost.
My advice to you; find a Sony store and handle that Z series, then an Apple crap attack store and handle the Air, then make a choice.... I don't know, the... I... Hmmm...
Exactly my sentiments as well. I own a vaio z-series from 2008 (the first of this line) and it has ALWAYS been a nightmare. I will never buy a sony ever again. Hence Apple becomes the lesser of evils.
BTW it seems the intel driver is not working at all and the reason the res is pinned to 1024x768 is because its using the fallback fbdev.
I'm burning oneiric alpha-2 now. If this doesn't work I'm guessing we're SOL.
Update: In 11.10 live session now and its the same story. I'm doing a fresh install of oneiric anyway but it won't make a difference. End of the road for now?
Last edited by dfacto; July 26th, 2011 at 05:43 PM.
I've filed this about it so far:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39533
some more logs (like lsusb) here if someone still wanted them
http://sarvatt.com/downloads/macbookair/
this is the drm-intel-next kernel where X works with i915 but the display is still blank that I'm referencing in the bug report:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~sarvatt/edp/
Last edited by Sarvatt; July 26th, 2011 at 06:02 PM.
Please keep this thread updated: I'm following it with interest, as my wife's air arrives tomorrow. I've used Ubuntu since the Warty Warthog days, so that machine will run Ubuntu somehow - there's no way she'll downgrade to OS X! I dislike Apple's approach to business as much as the rest of you, but until someone else starts to make attractive hardware, I'll be forced to buy from them.
It's a long shot, but did you try Stefan Glasenhardt's PPA? It seems to have a later version of the Intel driver than xorg-edgers (2.15 vs 2.14 for xserver-xorg-video-intel and 2.4.26 vs 2.4.23 for libdrm). He doesn't seem to have Oneiric packages, yet, though.
I just got the latest macbook air and my goal is to run linux on this thing almost exclusively. Any help dialing this thing in would be great. I tried 11.04 and am now on 11.10 alpha 2. As others have said I'm also stuck at 1024x768 resolution.
I found a phoronix article at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODk2OA describing what software is needed to get graphics running top notch. From the article:
Anyone know how to start compiling these packages the ubuntu way for 11.04 or 11.10? I can go either way, but at the end of the day I'm looking for a stable machine to work on.For the proper Sandy Bridge experience you are left looking for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel, Mesa 7.10, the latest libdrm, and the xf86-video-intel 2.14.0 DDX that should be released in the next week or so.
I would highly suggest everyone run a few tweaks to conserve the SSD. From the article at http://itezer.com/blog/ubuntu-linux/...-with-ssd.html, the top 2 are:
- setup noatime on /
- setup /tmp on tmpfs
I would have also reconfigured FF cache to go to /tmp, but couldn't since I don't have a way to right click!
On 11.10 alpha 2, the lines in /etc/fstab for / is:
My tmpfs line is:Code:UUID=XXXXXXX / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1
When running mount, they look like this:Code:tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777,size=128m 0 0
Things on the todo list:Code:/dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro,commit=0 tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,noatime,mode=1777,size=128m)
- get 1440x900 native resolution
- control keyboard backlight
- setup trackpad scrolling
- setup two-finger trackpad click for right-click
- figure out fn+<left>,<right> for home,end
- figure out fn+<up>,<down> for page up, page down
- figure out fn+delete for PC delete
- figure out power management settings
- setup F-keys for screen dimming, keyboard dimming, and volume control
- convert caps lock to ctrl
- configure audio
- configure camera
Thanks!
Thanks for the tips on Intel graphics. I'm getting mine tomorrow, if UPS isn't lying to me, gonna be interesting to see when it'll be running Kubuntu problem-free
But,
Please only do noatime and other tweaks to gain performance. Those tips were given by a guy with an original Eee, that's like practically the dawn of time with regards to SSDs. These days, SSDs are theoretically more likely to live longer than you, even if you write to them continually.
Here's a more recent article (and in fact, four years old now, so expect even longer life with the newer drives) doing a little calculus on life expectancy of an 80G SSD if you were to write to it non-stop at 80 MB/s until it dies. 51 years later.
What you should do, however, and that's not mentioned in your article link as it's too old, is choose an FS that is able to issue SSD TRIM commands (such as ext4 or btrfs), and remember to edit your fstab to enable said support (keywords "discard" for ext4, "ssd" for btrfs). Don't worry about swap, as it's already TRIM aware, and will issue the proper ATA commands out-of-the-box.
Don't worry about the life of your SSD - the logic board or your physical self will die before the memory cells do
Last edited by User4519; July 27th, 2011 at 08:29 AM. Reason: Forgot the link :)
Hmm, good call. I don't mind the noatime for performance either, so I'm going to keep the setting. Thanks for pointing out the ext4 TRIM option; I'll be adding discard to the options straight away.
What's up with the option being called discard? Wouldn't trim or ssd like btrfs make more sense?
One thing that might make a lot of sense is backups. Apparently SSDs are not the most reliable. So, while the SSD might not break because it's written to, it might just up and die anyway. Check out this article at coding horror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...ive-scale.html.
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