Debian on a 2010 MacBook Air 13"

Specs

MacBook Air 13" (Late 2010)
Model A1369 EveryMac.com
Intel “Core 2 Duo” (SL9400)
Memory: 2GB (kinda)
nVidia GeForce 320M (256MB shared)
Storage: 256GB

Notes

This work was done with Debian 12
The netboot installer does not recognize the wifi card. A USB ethernet adapter is needed.
To boot the installer from a thumb drive hold down the option key while powering up.
Memory is very tight on this machine, use the most lightweight desktop if possible. LXDE worked great for me instead of Gnome.

Networking

LXDE comes with connman as it’s network configuration tool (Found under Preferences). There are a couple of things to do to get the WIFI and DNS configuration working correctly:

apt-get install firmware-brcm80211

This is a bit of a hack by the debian maintainers if you are having problems with connman and DNS resolution:

rm /etc/resolv.conf
ln -s /run/connman/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.confg

nVidia Drivers

The nVidia drivers are long since out of date and unsupported. The nouveau drivers just work out of the box. I have not seen an issue with this.

If you read dmesg, there are a lot of firmware missing errors for the nouveau driver. There is a great write up over at freedesktop.org which goes over the steps on how to extract and install the firmware.

Brightness

Edit GRUB config

Append acpi_backlight=native to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub
Run update-grub
Reboot

Change brightness

The direct brightness controls can be found in /sys/class/backlight/nv_backlight/brightness

Web browser hardware acceleration

Chromium

apt-get install chromium

To check if hardware acceleration is enabled: chrome://gpu
To turn on hardware acceleration enable this flag: chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist and restart your browser.

Firefox

In settings uncheck "Use recommended performance settings".

Touchpad Config

Thanks to Int3ractive for their amazing work on finding these config options.

Install the Multitouch X input driver

apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mtrack

Add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "InputClass"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Identifier      "Touchpads"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver          "mtrack"
        # The faster you move, the more distance pointer will travel, using "polynomial" profile
        Option          "AccelerationProfile" "2"
        # Tweak cursor movement speed with this
        Option          "Sensitivity" "0.25"
        # Pressure at which a finger is detected as a touch
        Option          "FingerHigh" "5"
        # Pressure at which a finger is detected as a release
        Option          "FingerLow" "5"
        # I often use thumb to press down the physical button, so let's not ignore it
        Option          "IgnoreThumb" "false"
        Option          "ThumbRatio" "70"
        Option          "ThumbSize" "25"
        # Ignore palm, with palm takes up to 30% of your touch pad
        Option          "IgnorePalm" "true"
        Option          "PalmSize" "30"
        # Trigger mouse button when tap: 1 finger - left click, 2 finger - right click, 3 - middle click
        Option          "TapButton1" "1"
        Option          "TapButton2" "3"
        Option          "TapButton3" "2"
        Option          "TapButton4" "0"
        Option          "ClickTime" "25"
        # Disable tap-to-drag, we're using three finger drag instead
        Option          "TapDragEnable" "true"
        # While touching the touch pad with # fingers, press the touchpad physical click button
        Option          "ClickFinger1" "1"
        Option          "ClickFinger2" "3"
        Option          "ClickFinger3" "2"
        Option          "ButtonMoveEmulate" "false"
        Option          "ButtonIntegrated" "true"
        # The momentum after scroll fingers released
        Option          "ScrollCoastDuration" "300"
        Option          "ScrollCoastEnableSpeed" ".1"
        # Natural scrolling with two fingers
        Option          "ScrollSmooth" "true"
        Option          "ScrollUpButton" "5"
        Option          "ScrollDownButton" "4"
        Option          "ScrollLeftButton" "7"
        Option          "ScrollRightButton" "6"
        # Tweak scroll sensitivity with ScrollDistance, don't touch ScrollSensitivity
        Option          "ScrollDistance" "250"
        Option          "ScrollClickTime" "10"
        # Three finger drag
        Option          "SwipeDistance" "1"
        Option          "SwipeLeftButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeRightButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeUpButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeDownButton" "1"
        Option          "SwipeClickTime" "0"
        Option          "SwipeSensitivity" "1500"
        # Four finger swipe, 8 & 9 are for browsers navigating back and forth respectively
        Option          "Swipe4LeftButton" "9"
        Option          "Swipe4RightButton" "8"
        # Mouse button >= 10 are not used by Xorg, so we'll map them with xbindkeys and xdotool later
        Option          "Swipe4UpButton" "11"
        Option          "Swipe4DownButton" "10"
        # Mouse buttons triggered by 2-finger pinching gesture
        Option          "ScaleDistance" "300"
        Option          "ScaleUpButton" "12"
        Option          "ScaleDownButton" "13"
        # Mouse buttons trigger by 2-finger rotating gesture, disabled to enhance the pinch gesture
        Option          "RotateLeftButton" "0"
        Option          "RotateRightButton" "0"
EndSection

Created: 2024-08-17

Modified: 2024-09-25