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Geekery Kernel Linux MacBook Air

FaceTime Webcam

The last piece

The webcam built into the MacBook Air is quite odd in a number of ways. It appears to use an unusual hardware configuration involving a wifi-disabled Broadcom BCM15700A2 chip – and it was the one piece of hardware that didn’t work out-the-box on the Linux Mint installation. I also identified it as the culprit that was preventing deep CPU package sleep states (and hence full battery life) under Gentoo.

It isn’t too difficult to get it working properly – but it does require a custom firemware driver and activation of the right kernel modules.

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Geekery Kernel Linux Mac OS MacBook Air Operating Systems Technology

Macbook Keyboard HID and Touchpad

A better configuration for the Apple keyboard

As a piece of hardware, the Apple keyboard is great – crisp and satisying to use. In terms of key layout – not so much. Many users coming from non-Mac systems find the following frustrating:

  • The media keys defaults to on all the time. Most people, particularly developers, use the function keys (F2, F5 etc) more often.
  • The Ctrl and Fn keys are swapped, meaning Ctrl (surely the most important special key) is no longer at the corner of the keyboard. I’m flumoxed by this design choice, also present on the Thinkpad – it’s pretty infuriating.
  • Alt is no longer by the space bar. This is confusing for alt-tabbing between windows.
  • The “super” (start or command) key is moved compared to PC keyboards
MacBook function and control keys

Fortunately, there is a simple way to configure the mappings directly in the kernel under Linux.

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Arcana Geekery Kernel Linux MacBook Air Power Consumption

Battery life under Linux

Linux energy efficiency, laptops and battery life

While linux distributions proliferate on servers and desktops (and even on mobile devices in the form of Android) linux desktop OSs running on laptops have often been the poor relation. Most prominently, it’s become somewhat accepted that popular fully-featured distributions like Ubuntu and Mint will have significantly higher power consumption, and worse battery life, than Mac OS – or even Windows. Keeping up with Windows running on the same machine is typically considered a good result.

This was much the situation I found for myself when running Linux Mint on my 2015 Macbook Air. The features of Linux Mint are excellent, and I much prefer the interface and flexibility to Mac OS. Indeed, modern distos like Mint are now by necessity generalised for many different systens, which inevitably introduces some degree of unwanted components (or “bloat”).

What I was interested in was whether it was possible to piece together a Linux system more minimally tailored to my needs, and optimised for the MacBook hardware – and so maintain the freedom and flexibility while regaining the battery life performance.

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Geekery Linux MacBook Air Mobile Devices Operating Systems Technology

Macbook Air + Gentoo + LXDE

What?

Take a 2015-era, 11-inch MacBook Air. Strip off the proprietary software tailored exactly for this hardware and model. Install the most do-it-yourself Linux distribution there is.

Apple no more

First up, why (on earth) would I want to do this?

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Philosophy Software Technology

Wilful Sven

So a minor act of stupidity on my part today got me thinking about cleverness of user interfaces, and when it can sometimes be a bad thing. Specifically: I managed to leave the (side)lights on my car switched on overnight, and sure enough in the morning the battery was pancake-flat. One rapid bike ride/train journey later and I was only the one hour late for work, but embarrassingly this isn’t the first time I’ve forgotten them – though I have been able to get the car started (and indeed open the doors) on previous occasions….

So what’s my excuse? Well, the reason I turn my sidelights on in first place is sort of complex.

We start to think of systems that enforce decisions based on encoded tables of values as being “wilful”. Even if we agree with these ends, it’s a very natural to resist the interference, especially when it comes out of a “dumb machine”

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