From macOS to Linux

Will DeBerry — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 02:32:42 GMT

So I finally got tired of not having a linux desktop environment to play around with that I had to take the next step. Granted, I do have full Ubuntu servers up and running, but this isn't good enough when you want to distro hop and test new software such as libinput or HiDPI. So like I said, this finally got me to take the plunge. I had to figure out how to dual boot linux on my 2015 mbp 11,5 without destroying any of the macOS data.

Step 1:	Resize the macOS partition

Verify that FileVault is turned off. If not, you will need to disable before you are allowed to resize the macOS partition. Once off, reboot to apply.

Onec back up and running, launch disk-utility. On the left hand side select the macOS hard drive and choose First Aid. This should present you with a pie chart on which there is a dial you can drag to split up space between partitions. Choose your desired split and then apply.

When resizing is complete, feel free to turn FileVault back on. The rest of the process isn't affected by it.

Step 2:	Download desired Linux distro

In my case, I wanted Arch but didn't want to go through with the hassel of dealing with manually setting up and installing vanilla Arch, so I chose Antergos. At this point, just take the iso you download from your specific distro and create a bootable usb stick to install. In order to acheive this, I just used the dd command. sudo dd bs=4096000 if=/Users/wdeberry/Downloads/antergos-17.6-x86_64.iso of=/dev/disk2; just make sure to update for your iso and disk use case.

Step 3:	Boot and install

Using the newly crafted usb stick, reboot your macOS and then hold the left alt/option button during next boot. You should see a second boot option next to macOS. Choose this and follow the instructions for your chosen distro to install. I won't use this time to go through specifics to get linux installed.

Step 4:	Time to customize and have fun :)

All major features are working out of the box for me, but I mainly had to fight the HiDPI support and touchpad configuration to get things working the way I wanted.

The issues with HiDPI I ran into were things like the mouse and the top title bar of gnome being extremely huge. TO fix this, after a couple days of fighting with it via gnome tweak tool, I found the command gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1. This is the one command that finally put all UI elements to the same size. Feel free to change 1 to whatever scale you are wanting. Also, if you are looking for fractional scaling, you will need to combine gnome scaling and X11 zooming in order to achieve this.

For the touchpad to work more inline to what I have become used to in macOS, I had to adjust some config for libinput. Below is what I ended up using:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "libinput"
    Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
EndSection

Give it one more reboot or logout and back in to get everything back in sync and the rest is history. For more information about tweaking and fine tuning, definitely look towards the arch wiki for mbp.

A Crazy Attempt at KDE Plasma on macOS

Will DeBerry — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:48:00 GMT

So I started an adventure to see what it would take and see if even possible to get some kind of linux desktop environment running successfully on macOS. Let it be known while this was fun, this definitely did not work nor was practical.

The first step was to download and get docker setup on my mac. This all started because I heard about a simple program called kitematic on a linux podcast last week. Kitematic is a simple GUI wrapper around docker hub and docker in general and allows you to manage things without being intimidated. You can download this great tool via https://kitematic.com/.

Once you have that installed, I downloaded the kdeneon sponsored all image. This quickly led to the snowball that would eventually takeover this side project. I found out real quick that it was having a hard time finding the DISPLAY variable

This was resolved via installing xquartz for macOS. You can get this via https://www.xquartz.org/. The second step was to run the command socat TCP-LISTEN:6000,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CLIENT:\"$DISPLAY\" in a separate terminal. Once you have this running in a terminal, you need to set the DISPLAY variable to following in Kitematic: ipaddress:0 (replacing ipaddress with you address). At this point the docker image should start for you, and this is where the layers of crazy start coming out.

You will notice that once you fix the DISPLAY variable issue, you now run into openGL issues. You need to edit the file /opt/X11/bin/startx and look for the options defaultserverargs. Add +iglx to those options using you favorite editor and save. Log out and back in to restart xquartz and give it another try.

At this point, you start seeing some real craziness, red screens and all.

This is where I got stuck. Apparently xqaurtz is stuck to openGL 2.1 where KDE and more modern X11 programs expect you to be able to produce openGL 3+.

At this point, I wouldn't say I have given up, but defiitely was a fun experiement and provided great insight. We shall see where this leads me.

SudoServers (Posts about macOS)

From macOS to Linux

A Crazy Attempt at KDE Plasma on macOS