[ubuntu] Macbook Pro 11,1 (2013 Haswell Retina)

[conan.jen]

I just installed Ubuntu 13.10 on the new Macbook Pro 15 Retina/Haswell without any issues. I am using Refind. Wifi works, the keys for display brightness etc work. I will have to play around more to see what is missing. What I already noticed is that there is no sound and suspend does not work (see also the first posting). I hope to get the sound working soon.

I'm currently looking into sound as well. My current suspicion is that the speakers are default muted (as evidenced by looking at alsamixer), but I haven't figure out quite yet if that's necessarily the root cause for them not working, since unmuting and setting them as the only active device hasn't worked.

[kjano]

Can you share some information about your install?
Did you install grub or you only have Refind?
Which ubuntu image did you use? Did you have to convert it to .img to put it into a USB stick?

Frankly speaking I had a lot of work to do and thus was very lazy with the installation. All I did was installing Refind, using Mac's DiskUtility to free 450GB on the SSD, create an bootable USB stick under OSX, and then simply boot it. I did not had to change anyting or play with any config files.

I used an external ALFA USB wifi card during installation but after that the internal Macbook wifi is working just great. Sound is not working and I can neither restart the machine nor put it to sleep. Shutting it down is the only option. For some reason booting takes nearly a minute.

I am also only using the Nvidia card which is not good for the battery. I tried to install Bumblebee but this turns out to be a very bad idea and I ended up removing it for like 30 minutes running into multiple errors. Now I am using Nvidia's driver in version 319.

If anybody would know how to completely disable the external card and just use the Intel card, that would be great. Of course I want to use a mixed mode in the future (that is why I got the card) but for the moment I prefer 9 hours of battery over the ~5:30 that I would be getting with the Nvidia card running all the time (according to the power notification in Gnome).

I installed Gnome and increased the font scaling for the Retina display -- works great.

Offtopic: I hate the fact that I had to buy a Macbook Pro but it has the best hardware, best build quality, and since last weak is also the cheapest slim laptop on the market. Very sad... I initially wanted the Lenovo T440S or Yoga 2 Pro but the Yoga cannot show the color yellow (no kidding) and the T440s has a delivery time of nearly 4 weeks, the (by far) weaker hardware, and costs more....

[kjano]

Btw, looks like there is a tutorial here: http://randomtutor.blogspot.co.uk/20...on-retina.html

[kjano]

@conan.jen: From what I see we both installed via Grub und without going via the ubiquity -b route. I guess this may be the reason why the graphics card switching does not work. I re-installed using the tutorial linked above today but this is a real pain. I do not want to do this with every new kernel update and will go back to the regular grub version:

Sound:
This is what I found on the Web to fix that issue but it does not work for me:
sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base
sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install alsa-base
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload

[mpereira1]

Offtopic: I hate the fact that I had to buy a Macbook Pro but it has the best hardware, best build quality, and since last weak is also the cheapest slim laptop on the market. Very sad... I initially wanted the Lenovo T440S or Yoga 2 Pro but the Yoga cannot show the color yellow (no kidding) and the T440s has a delivery time of nearly 4 weeks, the (by far) weaker hardware, and costs more....

Same. I was gonna get the Lenovo T440S as well, but considering its price/specs ratio it doesn't make a lot of sense getting it over the new Macbook Pro.

[kjano]

Exactly. The Macbook is just soooo much better.

[kjano]

Update:

I reinstalled Ubuntu now with grub-efi boot and without any refind or related software. I really do not want to play around with this every kernel update. System now boots in less than 10 seconds and with the noncq setting in grub (libata.force=1:noncq )it does not freeze. I still cannot get the webcam working despite installing isight-firmware-tools and selecting the right macOs file by hand (the default will not work). Sound (i.e., speakers) are still not working but I can use my headset (neither changes to alsa-base.conf nor the alsa-daily ppa help). I am back to the open source drivers for nvidia getting about 4 hours battery with full screen brightness, surfing, and using (PDF)latex. Using the original nvidia drivers I got like 5:30. Please not that I never really tried this up to the point where the battery wasa really empty. I am just reporting the estimates from the notification app after working without the power supply for about 2 hours each time. xsensors works and reports the temperature and fan speed correctly (I hope). Fan speed is between 1999 and 6000 (using the stress tool for 100 sec). I hope this is helpful to somebody. Please feel free to ask questions if you have any. At this point, while many aspects (e.g., using the intel graphics as well) do not work, all the major parts are fine and I am enjoying the Macbook.

[vic.jang]

I still cannot boot into Linux.
I tried the following few methods:

1. Use Disk Utility to create 100GB Free Space, and reboot with Option key held to boot using a USB stick with 13.10 in it.
installation was fine, but when restarted computer and selected Ubuntu in Grub, the screen would stay purple and never proceed.

2. Create 100G Free Space, installed Refind, reboot, and select to boot from USB, and installed Ubuntu(with Grub)
the first reboot after installation, it went into Ubuntu successfully.
However, if I restart again, it would hang at the purple screen.

3. Followed the tutorial kjano posted, and it went into verbose mode after installation during boot, never finished.
(this is the first method I tried. And this tutorial is actually for last year's model btw..)


do you guys have any idea what I might have done wrong?
thanks :-/

[kjano]

Hi,

so here is what I did: I freed up space with the Mac DiskUtility. I created a USB boot stick from within Mac OS (you cannot just do it the regular way). I pressed alt during reboot to boot the stick. I used the live mode and then clicked on install 13.10. I created a ext4 partition (mounted as /) and a swap partition, in my case an EFI partition was already there so I did not had to create it. During the installation it found my wifi card and thus was able to get all updates. At times the installation was freezing so you have to be patient. After that I added noncq to the grub conf. Next, I used boot repair to switch to grub-efi (not bios emulation) and that was it. Are you sure you are really using grub-efi and not just the bios compatibility mode?

[bmerlover]

I still cannot boot into Linux.
I tried the following few methods:

1. Use Disk Utility to create 100GB Free Space, and reboot with Option key held to boot using a USB stick with 13.10 in it.
installation was fine, but when restarted computer and selected Ubuntu in Grub, the screen would stay purple and never proceed.

2. Create 100G Free Space, installed Refind, reboot, and select to boot from USB, and installed Ubuntu(with Grub)
the first reboot after installation, it went into Ubuntu successfully.
However, if I restart again, it would hang at the purple screen.

3. Followed the tutorial kjano posted, and it went into verbose mode after installation during boot, never finished.
(this is the first method I tried. And this tutorial is actually for last year's model btw..)


do you guys have any idea what I might have done wrong?
thanks :-/

A general note: I don't think the intel iris pro 5200 is ready for Ubuntu. I originally purchased the standard 15" Retina and the screen would show up with lines all over the place. Horrible resolution.

Now I got the MBPr with the Nvidia card and that one seems to work fine. Although no sound like everyone else is what I've noticed.

To answer your question, I tried everything 100 times and now I know what to do, I had the same exact problem as you.

I followed this guide: http://randomtutor.blogspot.com/2013...on-retina.html (Please use this as reference, but I will try to explain the part that is relevant to you)

I installed Ubuntu 13.10 with GRUB but after I would select Ubuntu, it would just stay on the purple screen and looks like the GPU would just get really hot, so this is the solution again taken from the link above:

Load a live USB stick and select the try ubuntu option
Go to the partition where you installed Ubuntu (in my case /dev/sda5)
You should see it as one of the hard drives in the task bar in the left or you can mount it through the terminal.
Inside the /dev/sda5, go to your boot directory and copy/paste the vmlinuz-3.11.0-12-generic and initrd.img-3.11.0-12-generic files to a usb stick or upload it online.
Type

sudo blkid /dev/sda5

in the terminal and store that long list of characters next to /dev/sda5 in my case because you will need to type it in refind.conf in MacOS X later.

For example: As an example if you see 27c9a93d-6cc8-2395-9a97-d105353e5c07 as your number next to sda5, then write that down (every computer has a unique number)

Once you have those 2 files and the hex characters, reboot into Mac OS X

Now create a folder called ubuntu in the /EFI directory, store the 2 files (vmlinuz... and initrd....) to that folder

Open up the refind.conf file (i used "sudo nano refind.conf") and go to the section where you see the "menuentry Linux {"

menuentry Linux {
icon EFI/refind/icons/os_ubuntu.icns
volume 5:
loader EFI/ubuntu/vmlinuz-3.11.0-12-generic
initrd EFI/ubuntu/initrd.img-3.11.0-12-generic
options "ro root=UUID=27c9a93d-6cc8-2395-9a97-d105353e5c07"
#disabled
}

Now edit that part of the file to point it to your files which I have done above if you paste the files in /EFI/ubuntu
Volume must point to the sdaX you installed it on, in my case sda5
and type in your hexadecimal characters after UUID=
Comment out disabled with a #

Save and close the file

Note: if you use the nano command to edit refind.conf then
ctrl+o is to save the file
ctrl+x is to exit


Restart from OS X and you will see a new Penguin during boot, mine was the one all the way at the end. Now click on that penguin and it should load Ubuntu, although once in a while it takes some time to load but it does work.
Another thing I noticed is that once in a while it gets laggy.

Hope this helps