Macbook Pro 15/17" Late 2009 edition

[muts]

Booted from USB using REFIT.
Working great, except for broadcom wifi drivers. Use the nvidia drivers for better GFX.

[jaykay232]

I also can confirm that a 13 inch Late 2009 Macbook works well. Trackpad even has 2 finger gestures! I look forward to a CUDA guide to use the 9400M, even though it is fairly underpowered. I have played with the Live DVD but haven't had time to commit to setting up the Triple Boot with Windows 7. I will update when that works.

Question about the Broadcom Wireless. I know that it says on your website that it fails to work. However, it has worked in other versions of BackTrack prior to this one. Is it the new Kernel that is causing the drivers to not work or are there just none available? It's just that it used to work and now it doesn't, so if I can get an explanation that would be much appreciated.

Great work, I have been a user for quite a while and appreciate all the time and work that went into this Distro.

EDIT:

Successfully Triple Booted my Macbook Pro. Took a while to re/install Windows and BT4 but it works now, quite well actually.

To install nvidia drivers I assume it is still "apt-get install nvidia-driver" What about CUDA? I tried using the CUDA install on the LiveCD according to purehate's old PDF but some of the packages were different and had different files.

Thanks again for all the great work!

[n0x|2m]

jaykay232 you cant install the driver using

apt-get install nvidia-driver

before starting X

i have a macbook5,1 and it works good with BT, also the nvidia driver.

i'm trying to install the correct driver for bcm4322 to let me connect trough wifi without using the ethernet cable.

[jaykay232]

If you do get the Airport Extreme card working please post it here or let me know. I would appreciate it.

[kufor]

hi there
any luck with wifi card please?

[nightlybuild]

I also can confirm that a 13 inch Late 2009 Macbook works well. Trackpad even has 2 finger gestures! I look forward to a CUDA guide to use the 9400M, even though it is fairly underpowered. I have played with the Live DVD but haven't had time to commit to setting up the Triple Boot with Windows 7. I will update when that works.

Question about the Broadcom Wireless. I know that it says on your website that it fails to work. However, it has worked in other versions of BackTrack prior to this one. Is it the new Kernel that is causing the drivers to not work or are there just none available? It's just that it used to work and now it doesn't, so if I can get an explanation that would be much appreciated.

Great work, I have been a user for quite a while and appreciate all the time and work that went into this Distro.

EDIT:

Successfully Triple Booted my Macbook Pro. Took a while to re/install Windows and BT4 but it works now, quite well actually.

To install nvidia drivers I assume it is still "apt-get install nvidia-driver" What about CUDA? I tried using the CUDA install on the LiveCD according to purehate's old PDF but some of the packages were different and had different files.

Thanks again for all the great work!

Would you be able to explain how you triple booted your macbook? Also, did you use bootcamp drivers?
Thanks!

[Amorstus]

A simple guide can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ma...elInstallation

Yes, I know this is for Ubuntu but it follows the same pattern and it should work fine (I have not tested it yet as my Time Machine has not backed up OS X so I will see if I can get it working after that is done but I have heard success from other users).

Oh and yes, BACK UP YOUR STUFF! I have seen/heard of many problems with TRI-Booting so a complete backup is nice to fall back upon.

EDIT: Oh, and regarding the WiFi drivers, I will have a post later about the Macbook Pro and Macbook models. From what I have seen yesterday, you should be able to utilize the Broadcom card as it is possible to do so in other linux distributions. I will test it out first and if it works I will post a guide in a separate thread.

[jaykay232]

Would you be able to explain how you triple booted your macbook? Also, did you use bootcamp drivers?
Thanks!

That guide that Amorstus posted looks fairly definitive. I didn't read through it all but it looks like they did some stuff that I didn't do. I won't post a massive guide since it was not an exact science, more just blundering and trial and error but here's sort of what I did.

I had OS X installed already and made a Bootcamp partition, (32 gigs).

Then I installed Windows 7 into that partition.

Booted with BT4 and resized the Bootcamp Partition and installed BT4 into the new empty space.

Synced the MBR. (I can't remember when I did this but I did it a couple of times through out)

Re-installed Windows in it's original partition but not overwriting the new BT4 partition.

Re-installed BT4 into the same partition it was in.

Synced MBR again.


That's roughly it. As you can see it is terribly inefficient since I had to redo so much installing and it took quite a while to re/install an OS 4 times! But it worked. Mostly just trial and error.

Once you have got it all set up how you like it you should back up your whole disk. There is a program called PING out there that is a Linux distro that does that for you. I haven't done it yet but the idea would be to mirror my whole drive over to a backup. If I screwed up my computer I could just pop the whole thing back over to my laptop, Restore from Time Machine in OS X and be pretty much where I left off.

I rarely use my Windows 7 partition so I don't keep active back ups of that, which doesn't bother me.

Hope that helps. Amorstus, I hope you get the Broadcom figured out.

[nightlybuild]

Thanks for your overview of how you did it. Right now I have a partition with Windows 7 (using bootcamp) and I was thinking of doing a similar thing. I was going to resize the partition from Windows and then install Backtrack 4, but use the bootloader that it comes with and I would be able to choose Windows or Linux right from there. Also, are you having any driver issues like trackpad, bluetooth, and the other devices. Are there problems with Broadcom?

[jaykay232]

Trackpad works fine, bluetooth I haven't tried and Broadcom is an epic fail. The bells and whistles (keyboard lighting up, dimming the monitor etc) also don't work. Most everything else works well.