MacBook Air 11-inch (Late 2010) revive

Recently, I revived my old laptop HP Pavilion dv3, due to the need of second computer to do my research study.

Since it is revived, and works smoothly, I then revived a tablet which was not used, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (P7500). I flashed the AOSP 7.1.2 Nougat. And it is revived also. However, the hardware specification is too antique, it can neither install Google Chrome nor Firefox. Most of the apps failed to run. 😩

Then lastly, there is a MacBook Air 11-inch (Late 2010), which I have installed Arch Linux onto it before. However, because it has been long time didn’t update all the packages, there are a lot of troubles.

For instance, after partial upgrade, when I ran pacman or pacman-key --init, it complained about

error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.6

Even after I boot with Arch Linux LiveUSB, this issue was hardly to be solved. This is because existing packages fulfil the dependencies, but the linked shared libraries’ versions were different.

Another issue was that it complained about

error: failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)) Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

This is even worst. The final solution was to install the latest gnupg, gnutls, and libassuan (as described here). Once pacman can work, then all the upgrades should work fine.

 

MacBook hot (heat) issue

After finished upgrading Arch Linux, there was an issue that I noticed when I first time installed Arch Linux on Mac. The machine was very hot, and the fan was spinning loudly. I firstly thought it was because of the WiFi device driver issue, because this happened even I run Arch Linux with TTY only.

I tried to install macfanctld (according to this), thermald, and cpupower (according to this). But none them solved the over heating issue.

Then after some readings from the forum (such as this post), the possible root cause was the graphic card driver issue, which Nouveau is not compatible with Mac. In order to solve this, I found the solution here (related post here) which allows me to use NVidia graphic card driver. This is a fantastic solution. I tested, and it works.

One thing to note. In the description of the solution, it says

[code lang=text] cat « EOF setpci -s “00:17.0” 3e.b=8 setpci -s “04:00.0” 04.b=7 EOF [/code]

Where the “00:17.0” and “04:00.0” may differ for each machine. However, “3e.b” and “04.b”, are just magic number that I just follow them. Though I don’t know what they mean actually.

Now MacBook Air is revived without overheating issue.