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

[karlkoch23]

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.

I sooooooooooo agree I had the Z Series as well and it looked great, but starting falling apart after working with it for 6 month...speed with an SSD was fantastic....
I also considered a MacAir, but in the end my despise for apple was strong enough...just looking at the pricing and their waranty policy made me go to the more heavy but much more sturdy X220 Tablet... I had to adjust to the different design, but after wanting to switch hardware components and finding how extremly easy it was made me understand why so many professionals are running around with thinkpads....

[dfacto]

@jonny Good to know. Once we get a system with the essentials working we can transfer and cleanup this thread into the wiki. Right now it just links back here.

Recap:
Everything now works except:

1) suspend (haven't tried hibernate), and
2) the intel graphics driver.

Aside from these issues, the only thing that needs some post-install tinkering is the multitouch driver. I updated my xorg.conf which should get you started. I am using the xserver-input-mtrack driver not the xserver-input-multitouch.

There is a bug report open on the graphics driver. Sarvatt seems to be taking care of this.

As far as suspend, I haven't looked at this. It would be nice if someone else could look into this as I am pretty busy these days.

Cheers

[orangegold]

How were you able to get the audio to work? Can you show me what drivers / configuration you're using?

[dfacto]

How were you able to get the audio to work? Can you show me what drivers / configuration you're using?

open terminal, run alsamixer, unmute surround.

[jonny]

I'm having trouble with the trackpad - I can't get the third tab to display in the mouse preferences dialogue. Running synclient doesn't help - it can't seem to find any synaptics device. I've tried both drivers that you suggested - any thoughts on how to debug this?

[qweefb]

Hey guys,

I am a newbie to Linux and I bought a MacBook Air. Since I am greatly interested in Linux, I want to install Ubuntu on my new MacBook Air. I have no superdrive so I tried the USB installation method mentioned here http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=320. However, unetbootin does not work on Lion. What can I do if I want to install Ubuntu by using USB thumb drive?

[jonny]

Hey guys,

I am a newbie to Linux and I bought a MacBook Air. Since I am greatly interested in Linux, I want to install Ubuntu on my new MacBook Air. I have no superdrive so I tried the USB installation method mentioned here http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=320. However, unetbootin does not work on Lion. What can I do if I want to install Ubuntu by using USB thumb drive?

The way that worked for me was to create a USB stick using the method described in earlier in this thread. However, note that this assumes that you already have access to a Linux machine - can a friend help you out, perhaps. Also note that if you use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid to create the stick, you'll need to fix a bug as described by me a few posts back. Finally, note that you'll fail to boot from the USB stick on a Macbook Air unless you add nomodeset to the boot line - again, this is described earlier in the thread.

[qweefb]

The way that worked for me was to create a USB stick using the method described in earlier in this thread. However, note that this assumes that you already have access to a Linux machine - can a friend help you out, perhaps. Also note that if you use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid to create the stick, you'll need to fix a bug as described by me a few posts back. Finally, note that you'll fail to boot from the USB stick on a Macbook Air unless you add nomodeset to the boot line - again, this is described earlier in the thread.

Actually, I have a Ubuntu virtual machine on my iMac. I will have a try when I go home. Thanks for your help!

[f00fc7c8]

FWIW, the 11.10 daily builds can be dd'ed straight to a USB stick and booted on the Air since Ubuntu finally switched to using hybrid disc images.

[dfacto]

Stick this in your .bash_aliases:

keybacklight () { echo $(($1*$1*255/100)) | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness; }

Then type keybacklight 5 (or some number between 0 and 10) to be able to adjust the keyboard backlight.