0

According to this Ubuntu Community Wiki page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro Ubuntu 12.04 still does not support MacBook Pro 8.x.

Moreover, even Ubuntu 11.10 has incomplete support for this device (Thunderbolt won't work): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro8-2/Oneiric

I believe a lot of macbook users (mostly programmers) want to install Ubuntu on their devices. So why there is not enough people to actually implement full support? What the problem is? Technical complexity of the task?

Bonus question: is there anything I can personally do to help this task without learning low-level drivers programming?

Daniel Vartanov
  • 123

1 Answers1

3

(Too long for a comment:) It's almost impossible to write a device driver without the cooperation of the hardware vendor. Even if the communication protocol, etc. can be reverse engineered or obtained, some interlectural property limitations may also make it impossible to distribute the driver as open source software.

Also drivers are part of the Linux kernel project, which Canonical doesn't control (and have very limited contribution). Most big controller chip vendors like Intel, AMD, Realtek contribute to the kernel directly. Smaller vendors who do not care about Linux users will probably never contribute any driver and users of their devices will have to rely on generic drivers. Linux used to have a big problem with the Atheros Wifi cards found on many Macs and it was years before the WiFi feature became barely useable. Now you have problem with the Thunderbolt port, which I guess will not get supported until they appear widely in PCs as well.

Still, I don't understand why you want to run Ubuntu on a Mac though. Most of the software that runs on Linux can be compiled on OSX.

billc.cn
  • 7,139