I upgraded my Mom’s old 11 inch Macbook Air since she said the screen was too small. Enter a 13-inch, Early 2014 model with OS X 10.9.3 and enter an opportunity for me to test how well Archlinux works on this gorgeous Apple hardware in the month of June 2014. Yes, I am looking to upgrade from my Thinkpad X220 and Lenovo sadness.

Firstly I must say, Archlinux wiki’s Macbook page is a bit of a mess. It over-complicates partitioning and boot loading. However I don’t feel like wading in there to try fix it.

It’s surprisingly simple to Archlinux going on the Macbook Air.

1. Boot into OSX. Upgrade.

• Resize the disk using Disk Utility, amazingly you can resize a running MacOSX install
• Install rEFInd, with the all drivers switch, ./install.sh --alldrivers
• Boot the Archlinux ISO on a USB stick by holding down the Alt key
• Fdisk, create a new partition /dev/sda4, mkfs.ext4 format it, mount it and pacstrap the mount
• Oops, pacstrap doesn’t work without Internet and 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03) is not supported by the 3.15 Linux kernel :( Had to purchase a USB 3.0 to 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN Network Adapter, Apple IIUC doesn’t offer USB3 hardware!?
• Reboot and with some luck rEFInd, will pick it up! Hint: Installing refind-efi and refind-mkrlconf should give you more control, e.g. for adding “rw quiet” or hitting F2 (twice).

Wireless is since working well so far with the broadcom-wl package from AUR.

Issues

Keyboard

The Alt key is way too small and I am not sure what to make of the fn & cmd key.

Fixed with setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_alt_win.

Someone needs to tell me where the HELL is the Insert key on a Macbook Air.

TrackPad

I am familiar with the Thinkpad nipple. I’m struggling with the trackpad. I can’t figure out how to paste!!!

Is it a “three finger click” to paste? Anyone know the keyboard shortcut?

Better with synclient PalmDetect=1.

BETTER with xf86-input-mtrack-git from AUR.

caffeinate

Suspending, shutdown etc. works out of the box with Archlinux. I think systemd should get the thanks. Really fast.

When I close the lid, the Macbook Air goes to sleep. But sometimes it’s doing a long upload or download and I do not want it to sleep.

Sound / Audio output doesn’t work

rain:/etc/modprobe.d$ lspci | grep Audio
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 0a0c (rev 09)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller (rev 04)

I’m not sure what I did, but it’s working now with pavucontrol. Might be my general confusion with starting pulseaudio.

Brightness buttons don’t work

Pommed dies with E: Unknown Apple machine: MacBookAir6,2. Filed a bug.

Is the Thunderbolt port usable? Yes!

User Experience notes

The Air doesn’t have a fan, so when I come back to using the X220, I find the X220 noisy.

The Macbook Air so far seems to hover around 51C (~70C with Youtube playback) and its temperature /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp doesn’t fluctuate as crazily as the X220 does. Which is good!! Its actually cool enough to be on my lap without feeling like I am killing my sperm off.

The 1440x900 screen is nicer, but I expected it to a LOT better. I guess I was stupidly expecting Retina.

The battery seems to drain as fast as the old 9 cell in the Thinkpad worryingly. I have tuned it with PowerTOP and still I’m not very confident at all. I suspect the screen on full brightness doesn’t help.

Webconverger

The distro that I maintain and earn a living from, Webconverger works with the Apple Macbook Air hardware too with the USB network device is attached.