Hey guys, long time lurker, just wanted to share my experiences getting the rMBP running on Linux (although I'm using Fedora 17 rather than Ubuntu).
- 3.6.0-rc2 works pretty well with all the patches listed earlier in this thread.
- 3.6.0-rc3 works well with just the gmux patch to fix suspend/resume
- When using Intel graphics I've noticed the display tends to distort every so often. Sometimes it's really bad, sometimes it goes for hours without issue. The symptoms are that parts of the screen will update in the wrong place giving off a flickering-type effect. I haven't managed to pinpoint what exactly causes it; sometimes it does it when I move it, sometimes it does it without me even touching the machine. I'm not ruling out a physical hardware issue, but I haven't managed to reproduce in OS X with the Intel GPU force-enabled, nor have I reproduced on Linux when using the nVIDIA GPU (nouveau or nvidia)
- Switchable graphics kind of works, but it's not ideal. Recently I've found that the Intel GPU can be brought up by my Linux installation without the need to force-enable in OS X, oddly enough.
- Screen backlight works fine in Intel so long as you have an up to date xorg-x11-drv-intel package. It works in nVIDIA 304.43 after a suspend/resume cycle.
- Wireless is extremely flakey. b43 kind of works, but has low throughput (I was measuring 30-60kB/s on an 802.11g network earlier) and buggy power management (was experiencing high packet loss when too far or too close to the access point). ndiswrapper gives better throughput (have had 2MB/s on 802.11g) but seems unstable on 802.11n, and connections randomly drop more often than with b43.
- Power management is pretty good. With the nVIDIA blob drivers and backlight on ~50% my machine idles at about 17W with Thunderbird, Firefox, Skype open. With Intel you gain another few W on average. nouveau has terrible power management support and doesn't seem to downclock the GPU when it's not under load, so expect the machine to run physically quite warm.
- Native EFI booting works well. I had a few issues with the Fedora installer but those issues are off topic here. Just ensure that the EFI boot volume is blessed properly and all should be well.
- Suspend and resume works fine with the Intel drivers as well as the nVIDIA ones. Nouveau is a no-go on this front.
- nVIDIA 304.34 had a serious issue where the EQ would overflow in the X server, and the driver would crash. I haven't yet noticed the issue on 304.43.
- Multitouch input is flakey at best. Despite lots of tweaking with xf86-input-mtrack, I still haven't found a configuration that doesn't register false clicks. My biggest issue is the case where I'm resting my thumb on the trackpad and moving the cursor with my index finger; when I want to register a left click, about 50% of the time it'll register as a right click because it'll think it's a two finger touch. For now I've worked around this by setting three finger click to be right click, four finger click to be a middle click and single and two finger clicks to be a left click.
- Microphone doesn't work, but speakers do. Headphone out works as well, and the little red LED that comes on inside the line out port is due to the IEC958 output (digital out) being active when it shouldn't. Just run "amixer -c0 set IEC958 mute" to turn it off.
- Keyboard backlight works, but you need the userspace to support it from the keyboard, otherwise you're going to need to prod /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc::kbd_backlight/brightness with echo -n.
- Webcam works, but without the microphone it's not a huge amount of use
That's all for now. I'm considering trying out the latest kernel from git but until then, 3.6.0-rc2 seems more stable to me than 3.6.0-rc3.
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Originally Posted by magnumripper
Re: ubuntu on new retina macbook : any experience ?
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