[gentoo-user] Re: Digest of [e-mail] issue 1710 (90678-90727)

[daid kahl]

>
> hi,
>
> after trying many time, i am again trying to install the gentoo on my
> macbook pro 4.1 . after pessing 2 days with it, still i have some problem:
> 1. sound not working (tried most of the solutions that available online
> 2. wifi not working
> 3. touchpad not working ok (two fingurs scroll working, but not the second
> click and not moving ok)
>
> anybody here using gentoo on macbook pro
>
>
I run Gentoo on a (white) MacBook v2, and with some exceptions (video card,
backlighted keyboard, network card, number of fans, something I forgot?),
the hardware is mostly the same to my knowledge.  In general, I have made
good documentation for how do install Gentoo on a MacBook, and it will be
online in a couple months.  I'm not actually that good with Gentoo, so there
may be easier or better ways to do the things I do, but I am able to use all
the MacBook hardware in Gentoo, so I'll tell you what I've done.  (This is
to say that respondants should be nice to me, because I'm not claiming this
is gospel!)

For the sound I did not have to do anything special for the MacBook, so I'll
just give a run down of the things you should do in general (which I also
did and found to work).  Make sure you've gotten alsa-utils and alsa-oss
from portage.  Then make sure to run alsaconf, and that the daemon alsasound
is started and in your default rc.  If you update the kernel, you'd need to
re-run alsaconf.  For my 2.6.26 kernel, I have these ALSA
configurations:CONFIG_SND=m;CONFIG_SND_TIMER=m;CONFIG_SND_PCM=m;CONFIG_SND_SEQUENCER=m;CONFIG_SND_OSSEMUL=y;CONFIG_SND_MIXER_OSS=m;CONFIG_SND_PCM_OSS=m;CONFIG_SND_PCM_OSS_PLUGINS=y;CONFIG_SND_SEQUENCER_OSS=y;CONFIG_SND_RTCTIMER=m;CONFIG_SND_SEQ_RTCTIMER_DEFAULT=y;CONFIG_SND_SUPPORT_OLD_API=y;CONFIG_SND_VMASTER=y

For wifi I found that madwifi-ng in portage does not make wifi on my MacBook
work; probably it's user error, but maybe not.  But it's really easy to do
it manually, though. Just get the drivers with subversion and install them,
as follows:

$ cd /usr/src
# svn checkout http://svn.madwifi-project.org/madwifi/trunk madwifi
$ cd madwifi
# make
# make install
# ln -s /usr/src/madwifi /usr/include/madwifi

Now, for updates in the source code, we need only:

# cd /usr/src/madwifi && svn update

Whenever you install a new kernel, you need to go to /usr/src/madwifi and
make && make install again.

If your touchpad is working and you can two-finger scroll then I'm guessing
you got synaptics working, and now it's just an issue to set up specific
details.  xorg.conf configuration for synaptics is now deprecated, but a lot
of the documentation for Gentoo on MacBooks is outdated and suggests you to
do this.  I've been a bit lazy about the switch to doing things through
HAL's fdi policy, so some of my configurations, which I ported straight from
xorg.conf, might be deprecated or unsupported.  But in any event, my
touchpad works, including things like two-finger click, scrolling, and so
on.  You can see it here:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Synaptics_Touchpad/Configuration

In general, feel free to send me personal emails about MacBook questions.

~daid