Installing OpenSuse 13.1 into a MacBook

OpenSuse 13.1 was released November 2013. During Christmas holidays I started a project of upgrading my previous installation.

Since I'm running on a MacBook 1,1 it was obvious that I was looking for trouble. Previously I had rEFIt running just to get a GRUB 2 -prompt. This time I decided to start from a clean slate. Literally. I ran
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
for the 10 first MiB of the drive to make sure, that it definitely has no trace of any of my previous settings. Since rEFIt has been abandoned years ago, I went for the replacement project rEFInd. I approached the author Mr. Roderick W. Smith and he was very helpful, but no matter what I did, I could not get rEFInd running on my very old 32-bit Mac. So, I had two options left: to go back to abandonware or see what would happen without a Boot Manager.

I failed on the installer settings-dialog, by trying to out-smart OpenSuse logic. My completed installation didn't boot. On 2nd try I simply went with the flow. As Mr. Smith instructed me, I didn't touch the most critical thing: MBR is not the way to go on a Mac! Here are my settings:

And guess what, it worked! OpenSuse 13.1 installer has enough logic to create a bootable Linux-installation to a completely blank hard drive. Nice!

The installer was pretty smart. Wi-Fi network was configured properly, it worked out-of-the-box. Apple-keys work: screen brightness, volume, etc. work as is. Also the typical trouble-makers sleep (on RAM) / hibernate (to disk), battery info, sound, and what not. There were only two minor issues: iSight does not work without the Apple proprietary firmware and the keyboard Apple-keys don't do anything usable.

To get the iSight camera working, see ift-extract -tool at Apple Built-in iSight Firmware Tools for Linux. It can dig the guts out of Mac OS X iSight-driver and equip your Linux with a functioning camera. The keyboard is a trivial one. Like previously, I just keyfuzz'ed the keys into something useful. See the OpenSuse 12.3 installation blog entry for details.

There is one thing you may want to check. If you enable SSHd, like I always do on all servers. As default /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2.d/services/sshd defines as TCP/22 to be open. That is the general idea, but apparently there is so much SSHd bombing going on, that I always tar pit my installations. For some strange reason Suse engineers chose not to allow that in a specific service definition file, but it has to be in the classic /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 file, section FW_SERVICES_ACCEPT_EXT="0/0,tcp,22,,hitcount=3,blockseconds=60,recentname=ssh"
I urge everyone of you to rename the services/sshd into something else and add the above line. This makes bombing your SSH-port so much more difficult. And it does not affect your own login performance, unless you choose to bomb it yourself.

You may want to check OpenSuse's hardware compatibility list for details about Apple Laptops. The HCL has info about what works and what doesn't.

In general OpenSuse folks did a very good job with this one. There was a real improvement on ease installation. Thanks Roderick W. Smith for his help during my installation and thanks to Novell for giving this great distro for free!