new macbook

So my cute little iBook decided to die last week. Since the conference season is about to come in full swing, I needed a laptop, and I needed it now. Long story short: no one in the 12″ 1000 Euro segment comes even close to Apple. I really looked, because I’m only a fan of hot pants when I don’t have them. (Yes, that was a bad pun on the Macbook getting hot.) But even the Toshiba U200 is not a real contender. Anyway, I installed Ubuntu Gutsy on my shiny new 2nd generation Macbook in the hope it’d just work and here’s the good, the bad and the ugly about it:

The good
All hardware is supported and supported pretty well. Everything has a featureful driver. There’s also a lot of people caring about this machine. I can find blog or forum posts about almost every issue. Try to find out anything about that Toshiba machine and you’re lost. A big thank you for the work done by the Ubuntu laptop testing team in helping me decide and know potential problems in advance.

The bad
This is the stuff I managed to fix that didn’t work out of the box. First thing of note is the driver for the Intel graphic card. Compiz refuses to work (I blame Gutsy) and it still needs the 915resolution utility to correctly identify the correct resolution. This somehow shattered my dream of flawless Intel drivers. ;) And the Ubuntu installation doesn’t install the DRI GL libraries. Shouldn’t that be done by default? The second thing that didn’t work out of the box was wireless. I had to build a current Madwifi snapshot to make it work. But after doing so, it haven’t had any issues. The third issue is the touchpad. The Apple touchpad is one of the best inventions since sliced bread. Unfortunately, I only knew that because I used in in OS X for 20 minutes. The default configuration on X is bad, since it disables all the awesome features. Fortunately, there’s the synclient tool to reenable them. The driver could also need some tweaks here and there (in particular for detecting scrolling). But after that, multi-finger operations are just too good to not get used to immediately.

The ugly
This is the stuff I couldn’t make work. Luckily it’s all software issues, so I have hopes. Number one: Suspend doesn’t work. Boy, is a notebook without suspend useless. Especially because startup still takes ages (go blizzard, go hughsie!). It just doesn’t resume anymore. And hibernate doesn’t work either. It just shows a blinking cursor forever. The brightness controls don’t work either and I was too lazy to install desrt’s hack. I’d prefer to have it fixed properly. And last but not least, the volume controls for the sound card get totally mixed up. This seems to be a problem with the drivers, since even alsamixer labels the sliders wrong.

Short summary: Ubuntu on a Macbook is still an experience and quite a bit away from “just works”. Looks like I need to play “find the sweet kernel” with it for a while. Other than that, it’s awesome.

Update: Since 2 minutes and a dist-upgrade ago, sleep works. I guess the Ubuntu hackers want to reinforce my last point.