Hello Everybody,
I’ve installed Ubuntu Mate 18.04 LTS in my Macbook Pro Retina 13" (mid 2014, model ID 11,1); I’d like to use it as my main operating system.
During installation process, I’ve chosen the minimal installation, and then I’ve added the packages I need through Software Boutique and, as a second choice, Synaptic Packet Manager.
At present everything works quite well, except some problem with HiDPI and some applications (for example Netbeans or the newer version of LibreOffice 6.1 installed through snap) and a couple of annoying problems for which I haven’t find any solution searching on the web:
every time I suspend my MacBook Pro and then I login, LCD brightness is set to the maximum; this doesn’t happen when I restart Ubuntu, but only when I resume the machine after a suspension.
if I suspend the machine with the power button, after some seconds it wakes up; this seems not to happen if I suspend it closing the lid (for what I can see, the monitor remains turned off ).
I’ve solved another problem I had with the keyboard backlit, in this case turned on and set to its maximum after every restart and every login; the solution in this case has been to set the following gnome variables with gsettings or more comfortably for a newbie like me with dconf:
org.mate.power-manager.kbd-backlight-battery-reduce FALSE
org.mate.power-manager.kbd-brightness-on-ac 0
I’m clearly not an expert and I hope that someone here can help me.
I saw your first issue with a MacBook Air of a similar year. (I also saw the keyboard issue and found the same fix — thanks for posting that for others to see.) I don’t think I ever tried sleeping with the power button, so I never saw the second issue.
I was guessing it is an issue with mate-power-manager, but that computer stopped powering on before I could test it enough to submit a bug report. (It’s OK, I took it from a recycling pile to begin with ) You can submit a bug report for Ubuntu using ubuntu-bug mate-power-manager and for the component upstream at that Github page.
Thank you for your kind reply, elcste. I hope the solution I posted can help some other user with my keyboard issue. About the second problem I have, I need to suspend the mac through power button, because I keep it on a vertical stand that prevent me to (completely) close the lid.
When I was searching for a fix to the backlit keyboard problem, I found also this command:
sudo echo 0 | tee /sys/class/leds/smc::kbd_backlight/brightness 0
that worked in the terminal, but I coudn’t figure out how to automate it at login, since it’s a sudo privilege command; I’m wondering if this could be the right way for a workaround for the monitor brightness too… Here some linux expert would be appreciated!
Looking at here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mate-power-manager/+bug/1774294
They say that brightness screen bug has been remedied, "by modifying line 11 of /etc/default/grub to read. 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor”, but modifying that line from “quiet splash” to “quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor” seems not to solve anything in my system.
In the mean time, I’ve also figured out how to make Netbeans 9 and Oracle JDK usable on HiDPI:
Tools Menu -> Options -> Appearance (tab) -> Look And Feel (tab) -> Preferred Look and Field option -> GTK+
Tools Menu -> Options -> Fonts & Color tab: increase default font size;
At present I can’t check if the same solution is applicable also to Netbeans 8.1 and 8.2, since the Options menu item on both versions is strangely not working on my system…
Instead the fix I read on internet about setting the option:
-J-Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=false
in the netbeans.conf file did not work for me.
) You can submit a bug report for Ubuntu using