Mac OS X (10.5) and Ubuntu Interpid Ibex on Macbook1,1

Here's my little list of what I had to play with in Ubuntu to make everything work the way I wanted it to.

1) Keyboard
Firstly, I wanted my function keys to only be used for the brightness/volume settings. Thus making it easier to use "Scale" from compiz (set to F9) and also to switch to other terminals via just Ctrl-Alt-F1 (and not necessitating the Fn key as well). To accomplish this, simply do the following (taken from here.

First make a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ (I called mine applekeyboard) with the following content:
options hid pb_fnmode=2

Reboot!

2) Sound
My sound was working by default, but was very quiet. Turns out it's a simple fix.

First install gnome-alsamixer from System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Then run it through: Applications > Sound & Video > GNOME Alsa Mixer. Finall uncheck the mute box for "surround" and it should be nice and loud!

3) iSight
Follow the directions at Ubuntu AppleiSight -- make sure to fully shutdown. Just don't reboot!

4) Accessing Mac OS X data
By default you can simply go to Places > *MAC OS X HARDDRIVE* and mount your Mac's HFS+ formatted harddrive. Unfortunately, permissions are a bit of an issue. So to resolve this, you need to coordinate the UID's between Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Seeing as I didn't want to mess up my Mac OS X install (and there appear to be less outlets to resolving such mess ups) I decided to adjust my Ubuntu install to fit my MAC OS X install.

This was accomplished by booting Ubuntu into recovery mode. To do this, during boot up you'll want to hit escape to bring up the GRUB menu. Then select the second option -- it'll be something to the effect of Linux Kernel _________ (RECOVERY MODE) where that last bit is the important one. It'll then ask you what you want to do, specify that you want to be logged into terminal as root (believe it's the second to last option, called ROOT). Then simply run the following command: usermod -u *uid* *username*. Where *uid* is the UID of the Mac OS X user you're attempting to emulate. These are always >500, making the first Mac OS X user have UID 501. Similarly, *username* is the username on the Ubuntu side that you want to have access to the Mac OS X partition. For example, if you're the only Mac OS X user and your Ubuntu login is squirrelChamp you might enter in:

usermod -u 501 squirrelChamp

Usermod will automatically update all files that have been created/owned by the user. However, I had a few minor issues -- just had to log in once, then log back out, and then log back in again and everything was kosher :)

enjoy!

last updated march 22, 2009