Apple Macbook Pro Retina (early 2013)

Macbook Retina Models
The 13 and 15 inch models are slightly different. The 15 inch model is more complicated, as it has both an Intel and an nVidia graphics card. The setup steps common to both are here, and specifics are separated off below:


 * Macbook Pro Retina 13inch 10,x
 * Macbook Pro Retina 15inch 10,x

What's Not Yet Working
Everything I can think to test works, except the following: [16032.337737] mmc0: Switching to 1.8V signalling voltage failed, retrying with S18R set to 0 [16049.257421] mmc0: error -110 whilst initialising SD card
 * Thunderbolt does not work with hotplug. Boot with the adapter connected.
 * The SD card reader is giving me some troubles. It works fine with some cards but I am having errors with other cards. But it does seem to work sometimes. I get the following:

Installation Steps
These instructions will perform a Dual Boot setup with MacOS. A single boot installation could be performed, but you will need to use the rEFIt instructions for installing rEFIt to the EFI system partition using bless instead of to the MAC partition (which is the default). I have not tried this yet but you can read about it on the rEFIt website.

Install Ubuntu's daily liveCD to a USB drive using unetbootin on an existing PC. You MUST use a 64 bit USB boot image. As of March 2013, I had use the daily as 12.10 does not have the right wireless drivers. However, you could use an older Ubuntu and install via a USB Ethernet NIC or via Thunderbolt (plug in the Thunderbolt before you boot).

Now you must choose your a EFI boot manager. Currently Apple's Bootcamp doesn't support linux. However there are two option for you. 1) Refit it is very easy to install (I used it myself) however be aware that it is dead. There is longer any active development for it.  I can confirm that is works well with OSX Mountain Lion however Apple is releasing OSX Mavericks which it hasnt been tested on. If you want to install it the link is below.  http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c1s1_install.html

2) Refind which is a fork of Refit and is being actively development and maintained. For installation see follow below link  http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#installsh

Use MacOS Disk Utility to resize the MacOS partition on the fly, which by default takes up most of the disk, and behind it create your Linux root partition of the size you desire.

Shut down the Mac, and boot it up twice (Requirement for rEFIt). You should start seeing the rEFIt boot menu after the second reboot.

Now, plug the Ubuntu USB stick into the Mac and boot the Mac. Select the new option in the menu which should be the USB stick.

When it boots, most everything should work except the sound on the liveCD.

Proceed with a standard Gentoo install using the Ubuntu live environment. Install your snapshot into the root partition you created (Probably /dev/sdb4) and configure it per the installation instructions but do not install the boot loader. Note that by default the EFI system partition will be sdb1, Apple root will be sdb2 and Apple recovery will be sdb3.

I use the EFI Stub Kernel method of booting. It is very simple and there are other ways but I will describe the stub method.

In this method, the Mac app rEFIt will act as the boot manager/boot loader and it will boot the kernel directly. The kernel must have EFI stub support compiled in.

Use at least a 3.7 Kernel. The wireless drivers you need later do not compile with a kernel greater than 3.8 at the present time.

Configure your kernel as normal, but add the following options for EFI Stub:

Processor type and features ---> [*] EFI runtime service support [*]  EFI stub support

Processor type and features ---> [*] Built-in kernel command line (root=/dev/sda4)

Make sure the root= line on your kernel command line configuration is correct. More details about Kernel configuration for EFI stub are here: EFI stub kernel

This assumes you do not need an initramfs. I do not use one. If you do, the EFI stub method may not be the easiest method. But it can still be done, refer to the EFI_stub_kernel  page.

Also, add the following Kernel options for driver support:

These options are in addition to the standard options you would select for Intel based PC's

Drivers, Input, Generic Input, Mouse: CONFIG_MOUSE_BCM5974=y (For trackpad support)

Drivers, Hardware monitoring CONFIG_SENSORS_APPLESMC (Motion, light sensor, kbd backlight)

Drivers, Graphics Support: CONFIG_DRM_I915=y (Intel 8xx/9xx/HD Graphics)

Drivers, Graphics, Backlight, Lowlevel Backlight: CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_APPLE=y (screen backlight)

Drivers, X86 Platform Specific CONFIG_APPLE_GMUX=y

Ensure the following options are NOT set (required for proper Broadcom wireless): CONFIG_MAC80211=n (Networking support, Wireless) CONFIG_B43=n (Drivers, Network Device, Wireless LAN) CONFIG_BRCMFMAC=n (Drivers, Network device, Wireless LAN) CONFIG_SSB=n (Drivers, Sonics Silicon Backplane)

Drivers, Multimedia support, Media USB CONFIG_USB_VIDEO_CLASS=m (Webcam)

Drivers, Sound, ALSA, PCI: CONFIG_SND_HDA_INTEL=m (Must be built as a module to set the option, see below) CONFIG_SND_HDA_CODEC_HDMI=m CONFIG_SND_HDA_CODEC_CIRRUS=m

Once configured, compile the kernel as normal but do not copy it to /boot. Once it is compiled, do the following:

Your built in Macbook SSD should be /dev/sdb if you booted from the Ubuntu USB which will probably be /dev/sda. Assuming it is /dev/sdb, your "EFI System Partition" will be /dev/sdb1, in which case, copy it to the EFI partition as such:

mkdir /mnt/efi mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/efi cp /usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /mnt/efi/EFI/Boot/Gentoo_37_x64.efi

You do not need to setup any bootloaders (Grub nor Lilo) for this to work. rEFIt will automatically detect the kernel you copied to that location and show it as a boot option when you reboot.

Complete the rest of the gentoo installation, and reboot. rEFIt should show Gentoo_37_x64.efi as an option in the boot menu.

Required for Audio: Add the following to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa: options snd_hda_intel model=mbp101

Wireless Drivers
There are two driver options for wifi.

- The BCM 4331 is supported by opensource in kernel driver B43. NOTE: Only B/G modes are supported by the in-kernel driver. 802.11n is not supported. To install disgrade the up listed kernel option for wireless and follow this https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Wifi

- You can use Broadcom closed source driver. In which case please disable kernel as detailed above. This driver supports 802.11n. NB broadcom driver must be verison 6.30.223.30 or higher

NB: Only broadcom-sta supports 802.11n at time of writing (Aug 1 2013)

Application configuration
If you plan to use the retina display at native resolution on the 13" or 15" MBP, you probably want to make it a little more readable. To do this, most toolkits have DPI configuration. In KDE, you can find it in systemsettings>Application appearance>Font>DPI, set it at 160 for 1.5x resolution and 220 for 1.0x resolution (letting it at 96 will be equal to 2.0x resolution). For terminals such as xterm and urxvt, edit ~/.Xdefaults to add

Xft.dpi:      160 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.hinting:  1 Xft.hintstyle: hintfull Xft.rgba:     rgb urxvt*font: xft:DejaVu Sans:pixelsize=16

For GTK, font size can be set in ~/.gtkrc-2.0. It can also share KDE settings when using oxygen-gtk.

Turn off backlight when screen closed
The hardware does not automatically shut off the backlight like other laptops. Make the following change. Edit /etc/acpi/default.sh and find the commented #lid) section, the lid) case should look like this: lid)  xset -display :0 dpms force off   ;;

In addition, edit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/00-xhost and add the following line to the bottom of the file. This gives root permission to run xset.

xhost +local:0 > /dev/null 2>&1

Restart ACPID and the X server for this to take effect.