Installing Fedora 26 Beta on a MacBook Air

Rob

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Since Fedora 26 Beta came out a few days ago, I decided it was a great time to throw it on my 13" MacBook Air.

This MacBook Air is a model number A1466 EMC 2925 which looks like a 2015ish model, 8gb mem, 2.2GHz i7, 512gb ssd.

First thing I did was download the beta. You can grab it from the GetFedora website. Once you have it downloaded, install it to a usb flash drive. From Linux, you can do this easily with the dd command.

Plug your USB drive into your computer and tail /var/log/syslog (or /var/log/messages) to see what flies by. You can also do a 'df -h' to show the storage devices to find the correct /dev/sdX.

In this example, we'll assume the USB flash drive is /dev/sdc
Code:
dd if=/home/rob/Downloads/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-26_Beta-1.4.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct

That may take a bit.. let it finish out.

Next, I shut down the macbook, counted to 5 and powered it back on. After hitting the power on button I held down the 'option' button to give me boot options. The image below shows what my choices were:

macbook-air-fedora.jpg

Click the arrow under 'fedora' and proceed with the install.

After going through the installation I noticed that I had no wifi. Luckily I had a thunderbolt-to-ethernet dongle since this laptop doesn't actually have an ethernet port. I hopped on google and found some great instructions from this page.

To set up wifi,
Update your kernel
Code:
sudo dnf update kernel
(then reboot)

Install rpmfusion repo
Code:
su -c 'dnf install -y http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm'

Install akmods and kernel-devel packages
Code:
sudo dnf install -y akmods "kernel-devel-uname-r == $(uname -r)"

Install the broadcom-wl package from rpmfusion
Code:
sudo dnf install -y broadcom-wl

Rebuild kernel extensions
Code:
sudo akmods

Then, reboot and hop on your wifi!

Messing around a little bit with it so far, I'm very impressed! All of the function keys work that I care about (screen brightness, keyboard backlight, volume).

Then, in July when the non-beta is released, I'll just dnf my way to it!

Thanks Fedora!
 

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I installed Fedora26 at My MacBookPro11,5.

But there are some problems:

  1. cannot wake after suspend.
  2. red light at headphone jack, cannot turn it off.
  3. screen brightness cannot adjust
  4. last, fans running full speed.
 
Since Fedora 26 Beta came out a few days ago, I decided it was a great time to throw it on my 13" MacBook Air.

This MacBook Air is a model number A1466 EMC 2925 which looks like a 2015ish model, 8gb mem, 2.2GHz i7, 512gb ssd.

First thing I did was download the beta. You can grab it from the GetFedora website. Once you have it downloaded, install it to a usb flash drive. From Linux, you can do this easily with the dd command.

Plug your USB drive into your computer and tail /var/log/syslog (or /var/log/messages) to see what flies by. You can also do a 'df -h' to show the storage devices to find the correct /dev/sdX.

In this example, we'll assume the USB flash drive is /dev/sdc
Code:
dd if=/home/rob/Downloads/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-26_Beta-1.4.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct

That may take a bit.. let it finish out.

Next, I shut down the macbook, counted to 5 and powered it back on. After hitting the power on button I held down the 'option' button to give me boot options. The image below shows what my choices were:

View attachment 2763
Click the arrow under 'fedora' and proceed with the install.

After going through the installation I noticed that I had no wifi. Luckily I had a thunderbolt-to-ethernet dongle since this laptop doesn't actually have an ethernet port. I hopped on google and found some great instructions from this page.

To set up wifi,
Update your kernel
Code:
sudo dnf update kernel
(then reboot)

Install rpmfusion repo
Code:
su -c 'dnf install -y http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm'

Install akmods and kernel-devel packages
Code:
sudo dnf install -y akmods "kernel-devel-uname-r == $(uname -r)"

Install the broadcom-wl package from rpmfusion
Code:
sudo dnf install -y broadcom-wl

Rebuild kernel extensions
Code:
sudo akmods

Then, reboot and hop on your wifi!

Messing around a little bit with it so far, I'm very impressed! All of the function keys work that I care about (screen brightness, keyboard backlight, volume).

Then, in July when the non-beta is released, I'll just dnf my way to it!

Thanks Fedora!

Hi Rob,

Thanks so much for sharing this.

I followed your steps and was able to successfully install Fedora 27 on my MacBook Air 2013 Model. I also ran in to the WiFi Adapter issue but once again by following your steps, the OS now detects the WiFi Adapter and I can connect to wireless networks without issue.


Regards,
Mynis
 

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