Installing Solus 4 on Macbook7,1

michi-zuri

Hi, I am posting this as Feedback on installing and troubleshooting my white polycarbonate mid 2010 Macbook with NVidia GeForce 320M graphics card:

Booting from live usb went smoothly, sound worked, graphics worked including display brightness control, media buttons and volume buttons. The chosen keyboard layout at install was respected for the created admin user. I installed / to an ext4 partition and made a Fat32 ESP partition of the recommended 512 MB just for Solus and its kernels.

Installation went smoothly and I could boot into ESP partition by holding the alt key on boot and choosing the corresponding EFI boot partition.

Upon booting into my freshly installed system I had several problems:

First problem: The slick-greeter login screen did not respect my chosen keyboard layout at install (this is a known issue). Instead it used a standard us layout. Same goes for the console keyboard.

Second problem: Suspend caused the computer to hang, needing to shutdown by holding the power button for 3s. Same was true for shutdown or restart, it froze the system running hot. After doing a full software update the shutdown issue was resolved, however suspend still caused the system to hang. I read that the NVidia driver works with suspend and uses less battery than the nouveau driver, so I installed it using DoFlicky. In the mean time I also installed the lts kernel and set the delay to 5s for chosing which kernel to boot. This turned out helpful later on.

On reboot I faced the next problem:
When booting into the current kernel the screen stayed black in X session as well as tty. Maybe the system still worked but I didn't test it, since I couldn't see anything. When booting into the lts kernel I could at least get a tty, but no graphical interface. Turned out nomodeset and all other suggestions I found didn't work to get the gui back. Then I found this, which linked to this thread. With this input I went ahead and installed refind on my original EFI partition (that is the one where macOS High Sierra is booting from, remember I kept Solus boot files on a separate EFI partition). To get my GUI working again with the current kernel I followed these steps:

I put shell.efi in the root folder of the Apple EFI partition. This was the hardest part, since the only version of shell.efi that worked for me was located on the Arch install medium. I had to download the iso, extract the file (called shellx64.efi on there) and copy it to my EFI partition next to Apple's bootlog file.
I installed rEFInd by making a REFIND folder next to the APPLE folder on the EFI partition, to be configured later.

Running the lts kernel in tty I ran this command: sudo lshw -businfo -class bridge -class display and noticed that I first had to run sudo eopkg install lshw. Finally I found that on my particular hardware the output was

pci@0000:00:17.0          bridge         MCP89 PCI Express Bridge
pci@0000:02:00.0          display        MCP89 GeForce 320M

These numbers may differ depending on the machine you are using.

I made a script on my EFI partition: /EFI/REFIND/fixpci.nsh with the following content:

mm 02000004 1 ;PCI :7
mm 0017003E 1 ;PCI :8
fs6:\EFI\Boot\BOOTX64.EFI

Note that I have no idea why 004 in 02000004 and 03E in 0017003E works, to me that is pure magic, but it does Just Work for me. The 02000 part and the 00170 part comes from above lshw output though.

Note also that fs6:\ points to the Solus EFI partition, it may be another volume number on your system. I found out which number to choose by booting into shell (option needs to be enabled in the refind.conf) and typing fs0: ls fs1: etc. to find which filesystem number the Solus EFI is located on.

Once I confirmed that my script worked for booting into the current kernel with GUI I made manual refind.conf entry for Solus like so:
menuentry Solus { icon /EFI/refind/themes/refind-minimal/icons/os_solus.png loader /shell.efi options "fs0:\EFI\REFIND\fixpci.nsh" }
and also added dont_scan_volumes SOLUS_EFI to avoid rEFInd finding kernels there and booting into Solus without running the shell script first. You may notice that I also installed a rEFInd theme. This includeds an icon for Solus, which is not included in the basic rEFInd installation. For details about rEFInd configuration check out it's website. It also mentions how to bless refind as default boot loader (needs SIP disabled).

Ok, NVidia works now, and yes my computer uses less fan now and I am able to shutdown, restart and suspend without any hiccups. However, it came at a cost: the backlight brightness control buttons do not function anymore. The screen is always lit up at 100%. Also, the sound coming from my speakers and headphones is now severely distorted and unbalanced to one side. Third hiccup with the NVidia driver is that the tty screens are black, the y work but I am typing in the darkness...

I'm giving this a break now, it's too much hassle for me. I'll check back in a few weeks to see if I can get this to work any better. For now I wouldn't recommend installing Solus on a Macbook7,1 if you are not willing to invest lots of time to fix these issues.

Justin

Glad you got it working at all, Macs are notoriously difficult to get distros running on.

michi-zuri

I managed to fix the backlight issue by adding a device section to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia.conf:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
    Option         "nologo" "true"
EndSection

After logging out and back in the backlight buttons F1 and F2 work perfectly! Also the giant NVidia splash screen can be disabled with an option here. Is this the right location to put these settings though? Or should it be put in a file somewhere in /etc ?

Justin

michi-zuri Or should it be put in a file somewhere in /etc ?

Yes, this should be put in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ it can have the same name and it will override any settings in /usr/share. This is especially important as next time there is an update to the package that provides the file in /usr/share it will be over-written.

See https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/guides/clear/stateless.html for information about how Stateless systems work.

Edit: Spelling

michi-zuri

Thanks @Justin that works as well, glad I asked.

Now I also got the sound working. I installed the same nvidia driver that was installed by DoFlicky, but without current and booted into the lts kernel. Booting from the lts kernel has no sound issues.

A new problem popped up though: When logging in the first time from slick-greeter the first time after reboot I get a white screen with error message:

When logging again, Budgie starts without any problems.
I found this in /var/log/Xorg.1.log :

[  2101.813] (EE) /dev/dri/card0: failed to set DRM interface version 1.4: Permi
ssion denied

Could that be related?

So, finally, the system is usable, with only minor nuisances persisting:

black screen on tty
error message on first login
no ability to set user language, seems to be overridden by system-wide language, not sure, will investigate further and post a separate thread, since it's not hardware-specific.

Also, I am wondering, if I can't use the current kernel, how long will lts be supported? I am investing time into Solus since macOS High Sierra will probably be deprecated in a few years and I would like to keep my beloved white Macbook alive beyond that, maybe until 2025 or 2030?! Is this realistic? Or should I investigate other distros instead?

Also, on the page https://getsol.us/articles/hardware/laptops/en/ some laptops are listed. What are the criteria for being listed there? And wouldn't it be nice to link from there to some source to find out specifics for getting it to work? If Macbook7,1 would be listed, it could link to this thread, or possibly a wiki page somewhere that can be kept up to date?! The list as it generates lots of hope, but may generate disappointment if it doesn't work out of the box. MacBook7,1 certainly doesn't work out of the box.