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

[daveMustane]

Welcome. The spurious mouse movements do happen indeed. Once in a while I find my cursor kicked out of sight and hitting some keys then makes the letters appear in the wrong place. But 'IgnorePalm' 'true' does not fix that ATM. It's only causing the thumb click issue, currently.

[jonny]

Welcome. The spurious mouse movements do happen indeed. Once in a while I find my cursor kicked out of sight and hitting some keys then makes the letters appear in the wrong place. But 'IgnorePalm' 'true' does not fix that ATM. It's only causing the thumb click issue, currently.

Why are you guys using a customised xorg.conf? What benefits does it bring? My screen and touchpad seem to work admirably with the default settings - unless the post-install.sh script has created a custom file in some place that I can't find.

[dfacto]

My feeling was that the multitouch driver wasn't as good as the mtrack driver. *shrugs* You need to declare mtrack in xorg.conf if you want to use it (at a minimum).

The mtrack defaults were, for the most part, acceptable. The few that I changed were under the recommendations of those posting in the mtrack thread. My conclusion was that the extent of customizations facilitated by mtrack driver more than justified any added trouble of configuring it. It also seems to be more actively developed, so this makes the long-term picture more favorable.

Update: I should also mention that just about everything else in my xorg.conf is not needed. These were left-over from when I was trying to get the video to work. However, they shouldn't hurt anything.

[mike909]

Microphone should be working too. Are you sure its unmuted?

Correct, it is working. System defaults to 'analog line-in' instead of 'internal mic'. Just needed to change that.
So as of now, fresh install with post-install.sh things are pretty much perfect; though I too am experimenting with touchpad settings to reduce accidental mouse-movements while typing.

Thanks.

[dfacto]

So the xcalib hack that the Mactel people cooked up really isn't very good and doesn't work for Oneiric. Here is a better way(*):

sudo aptitude install gnome-color-manager
sudo cp /media/Mac\ OS/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/Color\ LCD-00000610-0000-9CDF-0000-0000042737C0.icc \
    /usr/share/color/icc/Apple_MacBookAir4.icc
gcm-import /usr/share/color/icc/Apple_MacBookAir4.icc

Then, go to "System Settings" then "Color" and click "Apple Computers Inc - Color LCD". Then click "Add profile" and choose "Display". This should be the Apple shipped color calibration. Upon activation you will see a significant reduction in the blue tint present in the default setting.

I have made this change to post-install-oneiric.sh (note that this script is still available as new-post-install.sh which is just a symlink).

(*) - If your Mac OS parititon is not mounted, go to the Unity dock, select the home folder and click "Mac OS" under devices. Or if you prefer the terminal:

sudo mkdir /media/Mac\ OS
sudo mount -o ro /dev/sda2 /media/Mac\ OS

[dfacto]

@mike909 Thanks for looking into this. Its gonna take a fair amount of tweaking so I'm glad someone is giving it a go.

I'd like to have tap-to-drag; is there an option for this? I can't recall.

Another thing I would like to have, if you happen to stumble across it, is the nice "momentum scrolling" available in MacOS and just about every smart phone. This is where you can swipe-to-scroll and the page keeps scrolling even after you have removed your fingers. Of course pinch-to-zoom and other gestures would be nice but I have no idea how to enable this or if its even possible.

[dfacto]

I changed the poor naming of the post-install scripts. Please link to:
post-install-natty.sh
and
post-install-oneiric.sh

The scripts are still available under their former names (symlink'ed) but this should make it more clear which one is appropriate for which release. The scripts still check if you have the right version when run.

Note: I will probably not be updating post-install-natty.sh unless there is some big problem. I am running Oneiric so I would have to make tweaks to this script "blindly" which I am not comfortable doing.

Please see this earlier post for more details.

[dfacto]

I'm beginning to agree with daveMustane that the touchpad settings are best when at their defaults.

Here are the contents of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier      "Multitouch Touchpad"
    Driver          "mtrack"
    MatchIsTouchpad "yes"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Option          "CorePointer"    "true"
    Option          "Sensitivity"    "0.95"  
EndSection # "Multitouch Touchpad"

The mtrack developer offers "dispad" to disable the trackpad while typing (actually it disables clicking while typing). It seems to work well. To get it up and running:

wget -q http://www.dev.fatedmariner.org/packages/dispad/ubuntu/dispad_0.1_natty_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i dispad_0.1_natty_amd64.deb

Then, to make dispad run upon log-in, go to the Unity dock, type "Startup Applications."
Choose "Add" and enter the following information:

Name:    dispad
Command: /usr/bin/dispad
Comment: Disable trackpad while typing.

and click "Save."

[koadman]

Just checking in to say that Oneiric seems to be running well on my air too. Not surprising, the 1440x900 hack works with the Samsung display in my laptop. The post-install script made configuration a breeze. Thanks to all of you for all the support!

There's still a few lingering issues I'd like to fix/change and wonder if anyone else has suggestions:

power button. it shuts down the machine, even though the power settings are configured to ask before doing anything when the power button is pressed. this can be really problematic if i fat-finger the delete key.

tap&drag someone mentioned this earlier. i goog'd for x11 settings but didn't find anything that worked.

power usage. Is it me or is Oneiric running like a hog? powertop says my laptop's battery is discharging at > 19W/hour when the system is idling. Previously on Natty it was at 7-10W/hour depending on settings. What gives? A solution to this issue might also help reduce the fan noise.

[undoIT]

Has anyone tried touchegg (a nice config tool for touchpad gestures) on the 4,1 or 4,2? It works well for me on my other Macs (don't have access to the Air at the moment).

http://code.google.com/p/touchegg/

https://launchpad.net/~utouch-team/+archive/daily