Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on MacBookPro14,1

Ubuntu 20.04 just released and I can’t wait to try it out and install on my MacBook Pro 14.1 model. I am going to tell you what works and what doesn’t work, as well as any workaround to fix those issues.

The install steps are simple:

Download a copy of ubuntu 20.04 iso image; https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
Get a USB drive. Format it to FAT format via mac os disk utility tools
Using Etcher to create bootable USB drive. You can download the software here: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
After you fresh the drive with the iso image, reboot your Mac and pressing Option key to select boot from a USB drive.

Once you start to boot up from USB drive, you would notice something doesn’t work already: the track-pad. It doesn’t respond, but never mind, we can either use an external mouse or continue the installation via keyboard. (And we can fix the driver issue later as per the steps below). Follow the instructions and you may boot to ubuntu operating system now. One thing I like for this version is the boot screen is black install purple in the previous version.

Out of the box, here are what’s working:

Keyboard with backlight
Screen display and graphic card
Wifi to connect internet
USB ports
Battery

What doesn’t work out of the box:

Speaker (a workaround to use external headphone, or HDMI at an external monitor, or fix with this: https://github.com/leifliddy/snd_hda_macbookpro
Trackpad (a workaround to use an external mouse, or install the driver here: https://github.com/roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver
Bluetooth (it can be fixed by installing driver: https://github.com/leifliddy/macbook12-bluetooth-driver Note that if you hit error 404 to download 5.4.0 version, edit the script to 5.4.1 instead would work.)
Camera (It can be fix by install driver: https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki/Get-Started In case you hit an error:

make -C /lib/modules/5.4.0-26-generic/build M=/home/Workspace/bcwc_pcie modules_install
make[1]: Entering directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-26-generic'
INSTALL /home/Workspace/bcwc_pcie/facetimehd.ko
At main.c:160:

SSL error:02001002:system library:fopen:No such file or directory: ../crypto/bio/bss_file.c:69
    SSL error:2006D080:BIO routines:BIO_new_file:no such file: ../crypto/bio/bss_file.c:76
    sign-file: certs/signing_key.pem: No such file or directory
    DEPMOD 5.4.0-26-generic
    Warning: modules_install: missing 'System.map' file. Skipping depmod.
    make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-26-generic'

You could get rid of that error by not using modules_install in your Makefile.

Change:

install: 
  $(MAKE) -C $(KDIR) M=$(PWD) modules_install

install: 
  cp facetimehd.ko /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/extra depmod -a

Other customization I like after installation are:

Switch to dark mode.
Show battery percentage:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface show-battery-percentage true

Install gnome tweak
Install ubuntu restricted extras:

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Install atom editor

$wget -qO - [https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey](https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey) | sudo apt-key add -
$sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] [https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any/](https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any/) any main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/atom.list'
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get install atom

Disable trackpad while typing

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing true

So now everything works. And you have a secure and high performance operating system. It’s painful but fun with Linux since it’s open-source and allow you to do all kinds of customization. You can create all the bugs and crash your operating system if you don’t know what you are doing, not just frustrating but also rewarding experience to learn something new through troubleshooting the issues. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch.

Originally published at https://victorleungtw.com.