The adventure of installing ArchLinux on an Apple computer.

(Not so) Small Introduction and anecdote of my life:

Some time ago, when I was still a young man without much experience in the world of computing, I dreamed of having an Apple computer. They look good aesthetically, the operating system is nice and simple, they tend to last several years, the hardware is of the latest generation ... anyway.

In those days, my computer was a Dell Inspiron 1420 with only 1Gb of RAM, a 1.5Ghz Intel Celeron and an integrated Mobile Intel 915GM GPU, which came with Windows Vista OS. I installed Ubuntu 10.04 out of curiosity, and in the end it replaced Vista entirely.

Finally, my dream came true, my parents gave me an iMac Mid-2011, in the end it was not the revolution that I expected, but I was very happy with it, because after all it was a new computer.

In turn, I continued experimenting with Linux on my laptop, going through countless distros until I found the wonder that is Arch Linux. Yes, it is true, its installation can scare the novice user, but just read the installation guide, and everything will be fine.

Unlike the iMac, the laptop has already been changed 3 times, from the Inspiron 1420 to a Toshiba Satellite with AMD A6 (I hate it, both on Windows and Linux… I blame the heat and the driver in each case).

Then I got an ASUS, which had a Core i5 and NVIDIA graphics. After a week I fail, so they changed it for another. Now I have a Sony VAIO, and I am very happy.

Returning to our point, it has been almost 3 years since I received the iMac, OS X has regressed, it's gotten slow, clumsy, heavySo just yesterday it occurred to me to completely replace my OS X system with ArchLinux.

To get a fully functional system to my liking, I had to do the following:

UEFI compliant installation:

Fortunately, nowadays the UEFI Shells that come inside the ArchLinux ISO work perfectly, so I could easily start from USB and from there, follow the steps for installation in UEFI systems that comes in the official guide.

Another point in my favor is that I had no need to maintain OSX, which simplifies the work a lot.

Install a bootloader that works on Apple firmware:

It sounds ridiculous, especially if you've never owned a UEFI computer, but there is a point where I made special mention of this.

First of all, Apple does not use the traditional UEFI implementation, it uses its own (which it calls only EFI) and besides, it is based on UEFI 1.X, not on UEFI 2.X, which complicates things.

After some research, it turns out that only GRUB works correctly on Apple firmware, eliminating my hopes of using gummiboot. But there was a little surprise. It turns out that practically all Bootloaders make use of a package named efibootmgr.

Said package makes modifications to UEFI, adding boot entries, modifying them, etc. The problem is, Apple firmware CANNOT DO THAT. Using efibootmgr on an Apple computer could corrupt the Apple firmware, and the only thing that could be done in that case was to restore the ROM through a complex and dangerous flashing in the MB.

The alternative was to use an experimental utility called mactel-boot. It was better than nothing.

So pretty it would have looked with rEFInd

Utilities, graphic server and driver selection:

After the previous scare, and with a base system installed, what followed was the easiest, or so I thought. Adding a user, enabling sudo, all that kind of thing. Until we get to another problem.

Virtually all Apple computers, be they MacBooks (Air, Pro, Retina), Mac Mini, or iMac, have NVIDIA graphics cards, or the integrated ones from Intel. All except the line that came out in 2011, in which Apple had the brilliant idea of ​​including graphics ATI / AMD.

Choose between Catalyst and Gallium3D puts you at a crossroads. On one side, Catalyst it has much better 3D acceleration, but its 2D acceleration is bad, it breaks easily or even out of the blue, and it doesn't work in the latest version of X.Org (1.15).

Also, if I opted for it, it would be necessary to reinstall it every time the kernel was updated, which happens frequently in Arch.

The second option, Gallium3D, the famous free driver, is much more stable, and it is not necessary to reinstall it after a kernel update, in addition to having very good 2D acceleration. However, its 3D acceleration is really lousy.

I installed Gallium3D for now and continued with the installation.

Fuck you, ATI / AMD!

DeskE installation, basic applications and audio test:

I installed GNOME 3, Google Chrome, LibreOffice, JDK, Netbeans, etc. The only thing that gave problems in this section was that when I connected the headphones I did not get sound, but it was very easy, I just had to add a line to /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf.

Printer Installation:

I'm really shocked, because everything that I thought would be easier is precisely what has been most complicated for me.

And it is to achieve that CUPS my printer recognizes me (a EPSON-L355), which is connected directly to Wi-Fi, has been a real headache. I've tried everything, read the OpenPrinting documentation, used the PPD that CUPS provides, installed the driver, used the driver's PPD, and nothing worked.

In the end I gave up and plugged it in via USB. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a printer that 4 people use and I cannot monopolize it, so I will continue investigating.

Well, that's all so far, there are still a lot of things missing (like installing LAMP, the Android SDK, mounting my Xperia S without having to act as a network folder, etc) but that has been it for now.

 Here the little one, showing the first title that occurred to me for the article (too dramatic).