On my MacBook

OK, I got a MacBook w/ 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD and a Superdrive, MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) installed.

Overall, it's a nice piece of hardware. Shiny, great battery runtime, a bit overpriced and well thought through - As one would expect from Apple.

Useful stuff

• Place the dock on the left or right side. It's a widescreen display.
• There is a truckload of open source stuff out there
  • Carbon Emacs
  • firefox/thunderbird/gimp/
• http://darwinports.com/
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook - Getting linux on the MacBook

Missing

• Good picture viewer: Still looking for something similar to XNview, currently using http://www.stalkingwolf.net/software/cocoviewx/
• Keyboard shortcuts to navigate/select UI elements.
• Shortcut to maximize window
• A good packet manager (like apt)
• Stable Wifi - This is unbelievable - Wifi connection dies after a couple of minutes, the adapter has to be stopped and restarted again. This could become a real dealbreaker. One can find thousands of postings in the internet about this 'flaw', obviously introduced by software updates.
  • http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1352518&tstart=0
  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1441 - The MacBook’s mysterious WiFi dropout problem is still unsolved
• I switched from WPA to WPA2. Since then the wifi connection has not been dropped. Keeping fingers crossed...

MacBook running Ubuntu 8.04

In order to test the Wifi stability under linux I used the Ubuntu 8.04 live CD

Preparation

• lspci shoud show something like

02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4328 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 03)

• Extract broadcomxpinstaller.exe from the Apple DVD 1 (boot camp/drivers/broadcom)

unrar x broadcomxpinstaller.exe

• bcmwl5.sys
• bmcwl5.inf
• ndiswrapper-common_1.50-1ubuntu1_all.deb (deb)
• ndiswrapper-utils-1.9_1.50-1ubuntu1_i386.deb (deb)

Getting the bcm4328 rev03 to work

Boot Ubuntu, use the USB stick or mount the Macintosh HD

sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-common
sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Do the magic:

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

• Check demsg for errors

 ndiswrapper: driver bcmwl5 (Broadcom,10/12/2006, 4.100.15.5) loaded

• Bring up interface with ifconfig wlan0 up
• iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
• iwlist wlan0 scan

Foswiki on MacOS

Here is a howto regarding the installation of foswiki (TWiki fork) on MacOS

-- MatthiasWientapper - 06 Aug 2008