I have owned a series of Laptops, my current one is an older model. An Apple Macbook Pro 13″ 2010 to be exact. If you are looking it up for specs it is the Macbook Pro 7,1. It is important to note, that for a Mac, even if you are like me and intend on running linux you should still have at least a small partition running OS X if for no other reason than to update firmware. Apple hardware is a closed system and the firmware is only updated through their OS.
I was running Ubuntu 13.10 along side of OS X, but with the new LTS coming out soon I figured I would take a look at some other distributions. I’ve personally never been a real big fan of Fedora/Redhat, and while I’ve been an Ubuntu/Debian/Phoenix OS community member for quite some time I thought I would go back to SUSE.
I had purchased Suse 10 a long time ago, but obviously a lot has changed since then. I also didn’t want to purchase another Linux System. Not outright anyway. Why bother with so many great distros offering a free version in the first place. Instead I looked around to see what OpenSuse had to offer. I was pleasantly surprised to see the most recent version of OpenSuse (13.1) is a long term support release.
I was still running Snow Leopard on my Mac, and my Ubuntu was slowing down immensely so I figured why not do a full wipe and start from scratch. I pulled out my OS X USB install disk and wiped everything clean, then I installed OS X Lion and began the update process.
Once my OS X install was all up to date I went about the process of setting up a dual boot system. I used the Apple Disk Utility tool to partition the hard drive into 4 Partitions (1 for OS X, 1 for Linux Root, 1 for Linux Home, 1 for Linux Swap). I then downloaded and installed rEFIT.
Once rEFIT was installed I restarted the computer, yay, second partition was visible. I reconciled the two partitions via rEFIT tools. Then I restarted the computer with the OpenSuse 13.1 disk in the superdrive. Here is where things got interesting. For some reason the standard DVD would not work with my graphics card, at least not graphically. After two failed attempts I figured out I could install via text mode.
It took two failed attempts to install via text mode before it was complete. Next point of failure was GRUB was not found, DANG NABBIT! So I decided to try a new download on a whim. This time I downloaded the KDE Live install DVD. Much to my elated surprise the graphical installer worked. Install was smooth and was complete on the first attempt. Restart with no issues. Load into the Linux Partition, and get the following error “No Hard Drive Found”. Grub apparently didn’t install properly again.
Load back to OS X and look around for instructions installing on a Mac. Everything says don’t install GRUB in the Master Boot Record (MBR). Not an issue, I’ve installed GRUB on the Root partition every time. The only difference between how I installed this and what I saw on the web was my partition scheme. I personally love to keep / (root) and /home (home) on two separate hard drive partitions. I do this, so in the event of damage to the root file system I can re-install and not lose my personal data. Everything I saw on how to set this up on a Macintosh, said to format a single hard drive for Suse.
So I logged back into OS X. Reformatted my partitioning scheme. Restarted the computer and tried one more time. Success OpenSuse booted up no issues, I’m a bit frustrated by the partition scheme. Especially since Suse recommends the scheme I desired, but no worries at least it booted up.
I’m logged in and…”No Wireless” out of the box. This is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. In fact Ubuntu 13.10 didn’t support my wireless card out of the box either (which was odd by the way as 13.04 and 12.10, and 12.04 all did support out of the box). Whatever, at least I can boot up, my graphics work, oh and unlike my 13.10 experience the computer doesn’t just lock up for no apparent reason within the first 24 hours of use. It took another 6 hours to set up my wireless.
Note this six hours was not a lacking on Suse’s part, this was a lack of my understanding Suse. I’ve been with the Ubuntu family so long, I’ve forgotten some of the fundamentals of Linux usage. After learning YaST (Yet another Setup Tool), and doing some searching for specific tools I got everything up and running.
I have decided however that the Macbook Pro 13″ 2010 model needs a bit of love when it comes to OpenSuse 13.1. To that end I will write a step by step instruction to update the installation and set up and link it back to this post.
#OpenSuse #Linux
