Ubuntu on MacBook Pro

This post aims to collate all of the steps I gathered and followed from around the inter-web to install Ubuntu 11.10 on my MacBook Pro 8,1 and to get the wireless working.

Installing Ubuntu via USB stick I followed the instructions detailed here - www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/dual-boot-os-ubuntu. However, I ran into issues getting rEFIt to work. The installation would be successful but on restart, I wasn’t able to see the rEFIt menu. Googling around, I stumbled upon this command -

/efi/refit/enable-always.sh

which will force the rEFIt menu on restart. My experiences with this setup has been random. I sometimes can see the rEFIt menu on restart even when I did not run this command before shutting down the previous time. However, just to be safe, I think it is better to run this command before restarting. A smarter way to do this would be to add the command in the file

/etc/rc.shutdown.local</pre>

You may need to create the file if it is not present already. This script makes sure the commands in the file are executed by the time the machine is up after restart.

Creating the USB stick I used the following command to create the bootable USB stick -

sudo dd if=ubuntu-11.10-desktop-amd64+mac.iso of=/dev/sdXXX

Setting up the wireless Lot of googling finally pointed me to these three simple commands that got the wireless to work

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mpodroid/mactel
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-cw-3.2-3.0.0-14-generic firmware-b43-installer