Your MacBook Air comes with 90 days of complimentary technical support and a one-year limited warranty. Purchase AppleCare+ to extend your coverage to three years from your AppleCare+ purchase date and add up to two incidents of accidental damage coverage every 12 months, each subject to a service fee of $99 for screen damage or external enclosure damage, or $299 for other repairable damage. The current MacBook Air comes with a USB restore device, not a DVD. Does this make a difference? Also, is there a recipe to create a USB drive that can boot to one's fully updated 10.6.8 (or soon 10.7.x) OS? – hotpaw2 Jun 26 '11 at 20:18. Boot your Mac If you want to use your USB stick with an Apple Mac, you will need to restart or power-on the Mac with the USB stick inserted while the Option/alt ⌥ key is pressed. This will launch Apple's 'Startup Manager' which shows bootable devices connected to the machine. Your USB stick should appear as gold/yellow and labelled 'EFI Boot'.
March 11, 2017
Preface
I never was a fan of laptops, I mean 2000s era laptops, the ones that werebulky, heavy and hard to upgrade. The last point was especially important to mebecause in the 2000s you had to upgrade your station, add more RAM, more HDD,and newer CPU. You followed Intel’s Tick-Tock schedule, chosen Tock ones, andgot a performance boost (according to benchmarks).
But recently, all of a sudden I’ve realized that I have a 4-year-old machine withIntel i3 CPU and it’s fine. I don’t feel the need to upgrade. Partly it’sbecause I’m not using a Windows for a long time. On my Fedora, I mostly sit inthe terminal without desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, edit text in Vim andthat’s all I need. The heaviest thing on my machine - the browser - is workingfine too, I can play a 1080p youtube video, I can load bloatedsites.
The other part that saves me from the upgrade is that hardware itself is notimproving vertically, but rather horizontally. Simply switching to the newer CPUwill not make your computer life full of magic and unicorns - just compareHaswell and Kaby Lake CPUs. The onlything that increased in the clock rate and might gain you some performance isthe bus speed that was increased from 5 GT/s to 8 GT/s. All the other things areabout attaching more stuff on your CPU - more memory, more I/O devices. And thefunny thing is that 3-year-old Haswell from 2014 costs the same $310 as new andshiny Kaby Lake. I’m not saying that the progress in CPUs has stopped, there isa servers market, there are a gaming market and HPC market that needs and feelsall these developments. I’m saying that for consumer machines like desktopsthere is no need to upgrade often.
So there is a rare need to upgrade your machine now and recent laptops are nice,light and hold battery for at least 8 hours. So when I got an option to get alaptop at my job, I took it. The problem was that it was a Macbook Air.
And I’m a Linux guy, so I had to install Fedora on this stuff. I don’t careabout you guys whining “…but macOS is so much better and friendly and nice andblah-blah…“. No. It’s not. Well, it’s not for me. I have a simple andefficient setup that serves me extremely well, looks gorgeous for me and don’tinterfere with my work. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t try - I did, but workingin macOS without tiling WM, strange keyboard shortcuts (you can’t set Alt-Shiftto switch keyboard layout) and fake user-friendliness (I dare you to tell me howto show hidden files in Finder) make me dog slow.
So I’ve decided to install Fedora on Macbook Air and because it’s a little bittricky, I wrote this guide. In the end, we’ll have a laptop with:
- Dual boot macOS and Fedora
- Working multimedia keys
- Working brightness control including keyboard brightness
- Working laptop lid close/open
Preparations
Because we’ll leave macOS we have to prepare Macbook. Thanks to the UEFIadvancement in the Linux we don’t need rEFIt/rEFInd - modern distros areinstalled as a breeze. So the only thing we have to do is shrink macOS partitionand prepare USB stick.
Make partition for Linux
My Macbook has only 128 GBs of SSD and I’ve decided to leave macOS on it, so Ineed to partition the drive leaving some usable amount of space for macOS. Idon’t have any experience with macOS and thought that 40 GBs will be enough evenif I will use it.
To partition the drive I’ve used “Disk Utility”. Just press ‘+’ button and setthe desired size for the new partition. Leave ‘Format’ default (“Mac OS Extended(Journaled)“) because you’ll anyway format it with ext4. Then hit ‘Apply’ andthat’s it.
Here is mine, though it’s already after I’ve installed Fedora.
Create USB stick
First of all, you can’t use Fedora netinst image, because there is no workingopen source driver for Broadcom WiFi card that is installed in Macbook Air. Sochoose a full image that doesn’t require an internet connection like MATE orGnome.
Now, you have to create USB stick with Fedora. There is a tool called “FedoraMedia Writer” that will make bootable stick on macOS but, unfortunately, I’vefailed to boot with it. It seems that after repartitioning on macOS itimmediately mounts the new partitions and touch it making it somehow unusablefor installation.
So I’ve created USB stick on Linux with simple
Now for the installation part.
Fedora Installation
Boot into USB stick
Insert USB into Macbook, hold “alt” key and press power button still holding“alt” key until you see boot choice menu with Fedora.
MOST IMPORTANT! Linux partitions and installation destination
After booting from USB you’ll see usual Anaconda installer. First and mostimportant we must configure installation destination.
Enter this menu, choose “ATA APPLE SSD” and then choose “I will configurepartitioning” and click “Done” in the top of the window.
Macbook Air Boot To Recovery
Expand “Unknown” widget, find your 80 GBs or 74 GiBs partition of type “hfs+”and delete it. Now you’ll see 74 GiBs of available space in the pink rectangleat the bottom.
![Macbook air recovery usb Macbook air recovery usb](https://dinwa1391.njawxs.com/i/w?u=/images/C/7/C3187/C3187-1-dbd3-3TNI.jpg)
Now choose “Standart Partition” scheme from the dropdown menu in “New Fedora 25Installation” widget, and then click on the link “Click here to create themautomatically”.
It will create separate / and /home partitions and also a whooping 8 GBs swap.You can tweak automatically created scheme at your taste, just don’t touch“/boot/efi” partition or otherwise it won’t boot. I’ve changed swap size to 2GBs, removed /home and / partition and manually add / partition to span allavailable space of almost 80 GBs.
Also, I setup LUKS encryption for my partitions, because it’s a laptop afterall, if I lose it you won’t be able to steal my stuff by directly connecting theSSD drive. Also, LUKS encryption doesn’t make any performance penalty.
Then hit “Done” and confirm your disk layout.
Configure installation
Now when you have partitioning configured, just setup your installation withAnaconda.
To make hardware work nicely like brightness control and lid close/open installsome DE like MATE in my case. DEs have decent udev rules and configs forhardware. It also setup display manager (the one that asks for the login andpassword) and X server. It’s amazing how everything works out of the box.Something like 5 years ago it was a pain to make mic and brightness work and nowyou just don’t worry. Kudos to distro and DE guys!
You can stick with MATE but I’ll install and configure i3 window manager overMATE.
Wait until installation is done
and then reboot into your fresh Fedora by holding “alt” key.
Install WiFi drivers
Macbook Air has crappy proprietary Broadcom WiFi chips. To make it work you’llneed an alternative network. You can use USB to Ethernet cable, or, as in mycase, you can use your Android phone as a modem. No seriously, just attach yourAndroid phone, select Modem mode and you’ll immediately see the networkconnected.
Now, when you have a network, to install Broadcom WiFi drivers open rootterminal and do the following:
After that, you’ll have WiFi working.
Making things nice (for me)
Now it’s time for tweaking. My favorite!
Enable fnlock
By default, function keys are working as multimedia keys. To revert it back tothe functions we have to enable so-called fn lock.
Create file
/etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf
as root and add the following toit:Don’t try to remove hid_apple kernel module - your keyboard stop working. Justreboot.
Infinality patches
Macbook Boot From External Drive
Infinality is a set of patches for fontconfig that makes fonts looking gorgeous.I dare you to try it - after it, anything else will look like a crap includingmacOS fonts:
Getting my configs
Because Linux software is awesome and has text configs, I store most of them inDropbox and put known and loved configuration by simple copying or symlinking.
Install headless Dropbox:
And put dropbox CLI client to your ~/bin folder:
Now launch it with
dropbox start
.Installing i3 for MATE
Ok, so before that I was using MATE and while it’s nice I prefer tiling WM,namely i3. I install it with dnf:
and then copy or symlink ~/.i3 directory with the configuration in my Dropbox. Butwhat is really awesome is that we can use i3wm instead of MATE’s window manager- Marco. This way we’ll have all the niceties of DE like working multimediabuttons and brightness control while using our slick and nice tiling WM.
To change MATE’s window manager just issue these 2 commands under your user (noneed for sudo):
Logout and login and you’ll have it!
To exit from i3 as a window manager for MATE, use this in your i3 config
Settings
Everything else I configure with
mate-control-center
.Conclusion
So the hardest part in installing Fedora on Macbook Air is partitioning and WiFidriver. Everything else just works!
After using this setup for a couple of months I can say that it’s great. Thereare things that I wish could be better, but it’s mostly about hardware. Likescreen is crappy 1440x900 and keyboard is way too limited (no separate home/end,have to use fn+left/right). I would rather use some lightweight Thinkpad. Butanyway, the freedom to move your workspace with you is amazing, so I think I’llnever buy a desktop machine anymore.
My 2013 macbook air running (i believe) OS X Mojave wont boot. It stays on the black loading screen with the progress bar loading very slowly and when it is full after a while shuts off the mac.
I’ve tried resetting the SMC, the NVRAM, PRAM, booting into safe mode and recovery (both internet and local recovery) . Safe mode or recovery both were not able to boot.
I’ve created a bootable USB to reinstall the OS, however when booting from the USB the progress bar is very slow and eventually doesn’t boot from the USB. I’ve tested the USB on a different macbook air that had no issue booting into the USB installer. How to restart safari on macbook pro.
Any ideas on how to revive the macbook air that seemingly doesn’t have hardware issues?
Is this a good question?
Comments:
@savagegunner00 - Have you tried just running the onboard diagnostics? Restart the system and press the D key to enter into it. Tell us if you get any errors.
I ran the diagnostics, and there were no errors. The only thing it displayed was that the power adapter was not tested (as it was not plugged in). I restarted from the results screen and the boot goes back to the progress bar that never results in a boot.
Hi, did you check if the laptop is compatible with Mojave?
I had the system running flawlessly. I also made a high sierra installer which also did not function.
If you have the same model its compatible with Mojave without any special efforts. To check your system plug in your systems S/N here EveryMac - Lookup jump down to the bottom of the systems info to locate the macOS listing. Free video trimming software. Even if it's not listed as supported you still might be able to use DosDude1 to get it to work.
I would be careful as the newer APFS file systems does not run well on SATA based drives.