A few days ago we told you about the experience of installing the operating system Windows 7 on MacBook Pro Retina Display of Apple computer. The tests made showed that Microsoft’s operating system works pretty good about Mac OSX.
Today we do the same but in this case we will see what happens when the MacBook Pro Retina Display will install a Linux distribution, in this case Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
The computer MacBook Pro Retina Display of Apple had made just last month and the main novelty, as you know, is the incorporation of a Retinal Display screen offering a resolution of 2,880 x 1,800 pixels. The base configuration is based on a processor Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge, 8GB of RAM, a GeForce GT 650M and 256GB of storage using FLASH memory.
The guys at Phoronix got to work and decided to install the distribution Ubuntu 4.12 LTS on the MacBook Pro Retina Display. Unfortunately in this case things do not work equally well with Windows 7, as there are compatibility issues with different components of the Apple computer.
One of the biggest problems has to do with the management of graphics as the MacBook Pro has the option of using the HD 4000 integrated graphics processor Core i7, or the GeForce GTX 650M dedicated graphics, all depending on the use made of the computer.
With Ubuntu 4.12 LTS management we are not good, because there were problems even to detect the Intel integrated graphics. However, the display does show the images but with very small text and icons, just resize the text and images so that the size is correct.
Another problem has to do with the connection Thunderbolt, which does not work very well. When connected to an external monitor consumption of the CPU is triggered, causing an excess of a consumption and temperature rise.
These problems could be solved with new versions of the Linux kernel, which would work the best support for the internal hardware of the MacBook Pro and improving support for switchable graphics.
