Installing openSUSE Tumbleweed on MacBook Pro 13 inch (late 2011)

It's been awhile since I looked at my old Macbook Pro 13 inch from late 2011, with 125GB SSD and 8GB RAM. I've been on occasion posting articles about how to install Linux distributions on it and thought I'd give openSUSE a try this time.

This is a machine I've taken on trips around the world and back in the day ran many sessions, workshops, and demos sharing all that developer goodness.

Below are the steps and adjustments needed to get openSUSE working on these laptops in no time.

The first step is to pick between the two options that are available to us for the desktop. I've chosen openSUSE Tumbleweed, which has the promise of "You install it once and enjoy it forever. No longer do you have to worry every six months about massive system upgrades that risk bricking your system."

The second step is to get an USB stick big enough to hold the openSUSE Tumbleweed iso image. Note we are not worried about version numbers, as you "...get frequent updates that not only address vulnerabilities or squash bugs, but reflect latest features and developments, such as fresh kernels, fresh drivers and recent desktop environment versions."

I am a bit command line oriented so I just downloaded the offline 64-bit version offered as shown here:

This iso image needs to be written onto the USB stick we have so I've used a modern MacBook and the terminal to run diskutil list which shows me the USB is disk4:

Now make sure it's not mounted with diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4 and then run the following which shows not progress bar but takes quite awhile to complete the iso write to the USB stick so be patient:

sudo sh -c "cat PATH_TO/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-VERSION-Media.iso > /dev/rdisk4"

Once finished you can remove the USB device and move over to the old MacBook.

Installing on Macbook Pro 13 inch (late 2011)

Insert the USB device you created above, there is a port on the left side for this, (re-)start your Macbook Pro and be sure to hold down the Option (or alt) key, just to the left of the CMD key. This opens a menu of options to start this machine from and we'll need to use the EFI option as that's our USB image. Here you see I have the original macbook OSX setup installed.

Now it's booting from the device and you just can follow the normal installation. It really helps if you have a network cable connection you can plug your Macbook Pro into as the broadcom wifi device does not work out of the box. 

First select from the boot menu the Installation option to install openSUSE Tumbleweed:

The installer will run through a bunch of checks as it works towards the partitioning of the disk.

It asks what type of system you want to install, I chose here the Gnome Desktop, feel free to explore any of the desktops you prefer.

After this you end up at the disk phase where you are able to look at the partitioner tool. I always chose to leave the recovery HD and remove the OSX partition, then dividing that up into a /, /boot, /boot/efi, and swap partitions. If you wan to explore, then open the Expert Partitioner on the bottom of the screen (exercise left to you who knows what you are doing).

As I've done this before on this MacBook I can just jump ahead and accept whatever the defaults are here by clicking on the Next button on the bottom right.

Next up, setting your timezone.

And your user.

Finally you can review all the things that are about to happen on this machine if you approve and click on the Next button.

Now you get to enjoy all the installation unfolding before your very eyes.

Once you've completed the installer, you should see user login, something like the following.

After logging in you will see the introduction to openSUSE. You've done it!

This is just the basic starting point, we need to now update the packages, add a repository for the wireless drivers and development kernels, and install them before this is completed.

Updating the installation

This part is best done on the command line to ensure each step of the process is run without problems. Log in and open a terminal to start (note, our user password we setup is what you use for root when asked by sudo). We need to use the zypper package manager to refresh and update all the packages from the installer.

sudo zypper refresh

sudo zypper dist-upgrade

This will pull a bunch of new updated packages and install them. For the next part, fixing the wifi device, we need to install a new repository. The easiest way to do this is fine the YaST2 application in the menus and click on the Add button on the bottom right.

This opens the list of available repositories and we want to select from the Community Repositories as shown.

Next select the Packman repository as shown and click on OK to install.

Once that completes we can move on to fixing the wifi device.

Wifi setup

Now the only thing missing is a wifi driver so there are a few things to be done that require that network cable to be connected as we install the development packages for the kernel we are running and then build the broadcom driver for that kernel.

Back to the terminal command line, install the following packages from the new repository we just added.

sudo zypper install broadcom-wl broadcom-wl-kmp-default kernel-devel

You will be warned about +30 packages that are going to be installed, but that's what we want. Note that the kmp-default suffix is openSUSE's convention for kernel module packages built against the default kernel. Tumbleweed handles the kernel module build automatically as part of the package install.

The following shows the installation of packages.

Now we want to trigger a rebuild (should be automatic, but better to be safe), so we need to install dams and lsmod as follows.

# Install dkms and lsmod
sudo zypper install dkms lsmod

Now trigger the rebuild and verify.

# Trigger DKMS rebuild (usually automatic, but to force it)
sudo dkms autoinstall

# Verify
lsmod | grep wl

If you don't see the models, it might be because you need to reboot the system to load the kernel. Once you've done that you can set up your wireless connection in openSUSE Tumbleweed in the top right drop down menu.

Pretty straight forward once you have the right device drivers, so hope you enjoyed this update to the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed on your old Macbook Pro 13 inch from late 2011!