openSUSE 10.3 on Macbook (Santa Rosa)

In this article I will describe the difficulties you might have with installing openSUSE 10.3 on the new MacBook (Santa Rosa, bought on March, 2008) and guide you through the process of compiling a custom kernel that will support all the hardware. For wifi you need ndiswrapper. Installing openSUSE works fine. But there are some issues with the default kernel, i.e. sound does not work. Therefore it is necessary to install a new kernel.

Installing necessary development tools (copied from: here)

Open YaST and go to Software Management:

Now select “Patterns” from the “Filter” drop-down selector (top left).

Make sure you have checked ALL of these:

Base Development
KDE Development
C/C++ Development
Linux Kernel Development

Also locate and install the main Xorg/X11 Development packages such as xorg-x11-devel.

Downloading kernel and some additional dependencies

Open a terminal, create an “installs” directory and download kernel-2.6.24 and some dependencies:

mkdir -p installs/customkernel
cd installs/customkernel
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.24.tar.bz2
wget https://mihosoft.eu/Media/files/howtos/opensuseonmacbook/kernel2.6.24deps.tar.bz2

After downloading the kernel and the dependency archive you have to extract them by typing:

tar xvjf *.bz2
mv linux-2.6.24 kernel_2.6.24_deps/

Patching the kernel and installing dependencies

Now it is time to install the rpm packages:

cd kernel_2.6.24_deps
sudo rpm -Uhv *.rpm

If everything went well you can proceed with patching the kernel. We will first copy the bootsplash patch into the kernel directory and then copy the kernel to /usr/src and then start with the mactel patches:

cp bootsplash-3.1.6-2.6.21.diff linux-2.6.24
su
cp -r linux-2.6.24 /usr/src
cd /usr/src
rm linux
ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.24 linux
cd linux
patch -p1 < bootsplash-3.1.6-2.6.21.diff
exit
cd mactel-patches-2.6.24
sudo ./apply /usr/src/linux

Now you have a fully patched kernel! The only thing that’s left is to actually build the kernel.

Building and installing the kernel

We start by copying a customized config file. You don’t have to do any manual configuration!

sudo cp config /usr/src/linux/.config

After that the annoying part is over and it’s getting a bit more exciting:) Now we start compiling and installing the kernel. Be aware that this may take some time (several minutes):

su
cd /usr/src/linux
make && make modulesinstall && makeinstall

It’s over! The kernel has been created and installed. Usually even the boot menu entries have been created (but better check that). So everything you have to do is to reboot:

You should have full hardware support now!

Have fun!

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