> In the end I uninstalled Debian because of the following problems: > > 1. The brightness of the screen does not readjust after > suspend/resume in Debian (I worked hard trying to solve this with > some published hacks, but no full success). > > 2. Often the Mac got hot with closed lid, eating the battery. This > seems caused by the above firmware manipulation hack. > > 3. Ugrades of OSX seem to damage the reFind configuration. Also there > is a problem writing the hidden rescue partition during an upgrade of > OSX. > \
I'm writing this from wheezy on my macbook pro (2011). It took a while to get it working well but now it has been for >> 1 year. Some of the key things that have helped: 1. Refind boot manager - I have it on the OS X partition. so of course I have to go into OS X to edit it. This works out OK though. OS X upgrades disable it but the program that comes with it can be easily run within OS X to re-enable it. The only inconvenience is that this happens rarely so I don't remember what to do....I use some parameters to the kernel in the refind configuration file to disable intel graphics etc, see below.... 2. open source AMD video driver. This macbook model has Intel low power and AMD high power graphics cards. I have never been able to switch between them successfully in Linux. I used to use the Intel and had the problem above that when you suspend it doesn't come back in a working state (black screen). By disabling the intel and using AMD open source I'm getting good results. The AMD driver in recent kernels is good and doesn't burn the battery badly, AND suspend/resume works fine. As in totally reliably. AMD closed source would probably result in trouble with dkms etc and might not resume, I decided not to even try that. Also, you need AMD for HDMI. (I can use HDMI as external monitor ) I know some models have nVidia not AMD-- maybe the same logic applies for that. 3. nonfree firmware is needed for wifi. you can get atheros based usb-connecting external Wifi adapters if you need to. I did that for a bit, then I got the broadcom going and that's more convenient. 4. touchpad - there are many tutorials online about this, don't recall exact steps. I have two finger scrolling working well, I just use lower right corner for right click. 5. I don't try to boot straight to the GUI (or gdm3 etc), I boot to text mode and run a script with the following commands (as root) to fix some things with the graphics and power management: #!/bin/bash /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop modprobe radeon echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level /etc/init.d/gdm3 start I've been using this for so long I don't remember how it works or even exactly what it does but it works. Incidentally suspend/resume works in GRAPHICS mode as you would want it to. This script is only for a fresh boot and as you can see takes me right to gdm3 to log in. things I have never resolved: screen brightness keys, keyboard brightness keys - I'm not sure if hibernate would work as I don't have a swap partition to use for it. I did make shell scripts to do these things and they can be mapped to key combinations in various ways if those things are a priority. Lately I decided to try and ditch pulseaudio (I don't like systemd etc, just an experiment really) and found that alsa and jack are working OK for me, including output to HDMI. I went a long time without looking at OS X, recently I was in it to play a game some, really overall wheezy/enlightenment/amarok etc is better IMHO then the OS X equivalents. And it's FREE......... John Holland jholl...@vin-dit.org gpg public key ID 0xEFAF0D15 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150129195725.498c65f8@herbie
