Umar Ahmad

Installing Fedora on MacBook

Recently, I’ve been using MacBook Air along with its default OS macOS Sierra for about a year. I decided to switch back to Fedora once I started noticing the decreasing customizability after every update. Also there were a lot of API level changes that somehow always ended up breaking my workflow.

The following are the steps with which I got Fedora completely working on my machine.

Prerequisites

Alternatively, you can use dd utility to do the same without the Fedora Media Writer by doing


    diskutil list # get the disk name from the output which is something like /dev/disk1
    diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
    sudo dd if=/Users/umar/Downloads/Fedora-Workstation.iso of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=512k # notice the prepended r in the disk name
    diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Keep in mind, since Mac will only allow a single more partition to be added, keep the partition size as high as possible if you’re going to use fedora as your primary OS.

Click on Apply and Confirm to get a new partition.

Installation

Select the USB disk and Select Start fedora live.

The following screens should be fairly simple

Select the Fedora Disk partition click “Delete” and then on “Reclaim space” this will automatically reclaim the space and create space for Fedora.

Post-Installation


cd /usr/src
wget https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
mv bcwc_pcie-master bcwc_pcie
cd /usr/src/bcwc_pcie/firmware
make
sudo make install
cd /usr/src/bcwc_pcie/
make clean
make
sudo make install
sudo depmod
sudo modprobe facetimehd

Check it by running Cheese.

xmodmap -e "keycode  94 = grave asciitilde"
xset r rate 200 38 # Increase keyboard repeat rate

You can optionally switch control and CapsLock and make Return act like control when long-pressed by installing xcape and running

setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
xmodmap -e "remove Control = Control_R"
xmodmap -e "keycode 0x69 = Return"
xmodmap -e "keycode 0x24 = Control_R"
xmodmap -e "add Control = Control_R"
xcape -t 10000 -e "Control_R=Return"

Typing > Alt/Win behavior > Alt is Swapped with Win

Create /etc/systemd/system/powertop.service with this content

[Unit]
Description=Powertop tunings

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/sbin/powertop --auto-tune

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Followed by sudo systemctl enable powertop.service

You can get the name of the disk by the Disks program. To have write access to the mount partition

Also, you can add it to the your fstab

You can now enjoy your Fedora install and carry on to install some [other utilities on Fedora]({{ root_url }}/blog/2014/09/27/things-to-do-after-installing-fedora/).