I installed Linux on my MacBook Pro 4.1. Here is the procedure I followed and the problems I had to solve to make it working.

First of all create a bootable backup copy of your disk on a USB disk. It may be fundamental to recover any error.

Using Disk Utility the unique partition of the Mac disk can be resized. Open Disk utility, select the disk and drag up the lower right corner of the partition rectangle to resize the partition. Then click the resize button and cross fingers To have the procedure working you need

• enough free space to accommodate the resize
• system files not allocated in the upper part of the partition you are going to resize

Making free space is trivial. If system files have been allocated in the partition part to be resized, the solution is to apply the very same procedure after booting from MacOSX DVD (select disk utilities before starting installation )

Also, it helped me to proceed in small steps: resize 10G then another 10G … It worked when resizing 20G all in one shot was not working.

I installed the rEFIt boot loader. It is available from the sourceforge web pages. It will be useful to fix problems and keep dual boot with the original Mac OS X in the resized partition.

I tried Ubuntu 10.04 and OpenSuse 11.3. In both cases, boot from the installation disk and use manual partitioner to install a swap partition and a Linux partition in the “hole” left after resizing Mac OS X partition. Be careful to install boot loader in the linux partition, not in the disk MBR (in the settings of the boot loader specify ”/dev/sdaXX” (usually /dev/sda3 or 4, being 1 the rEFIt partition and 2 the MAC OS X partition) not ”/dev/sda” I eventually decided to usu Ubuntu, that worker mostly “out-of-the-box”, has a more “traditional” interface and is well supported on Mac (see also this web page.

In order to have the video working and the wireless working, select “System” → “Administration” → “Hardware drivers” and enable the broadcomm driver (wireless) and the nVidia drivers (I'm currently using the “173” version rather than the “recommended” one, as it seems to work better).

You must enable the two finger scroll and tap from “System” “Preferences” “Mouse” applet

Run the update manager from the System menu and install the suggested updates.

Does not work out of the box. Need to install the proper driver. Download linuxwacom from sourceforge. Configure with –enable-wacom. The move to src and compile. Eventually install the wacom.ko kernel module (I followed the instructions here.

I installed the following packages:

• g++ (to support programming activities)
• texlive-full + Kile (latex + latex editor)
• subversion
• gnuplot
• compiz-setting
• vlc

using Synaptic manager

I also installed

• Thunderbird (from mozilla web site). To make it appear in the “Office” menu, I installed a new command item with the “Preference” → “Main menu” applet
• lighting extension for thunderbird (from mozilla web site). To install it, I used the tools menu of Thunderbird
• Skype (from the skype web site)
• Flash player (from “Applications” → “Ubuntu software center” → “Get software” “Canonical partners” applet
• jarnal (from jarnal home page)

vi comes in standard distribution without the runtime. To have all features enabled (e.g. syntax highlight) you have to install vim-runtime and vim throught Synaptics

Dept. printers are recognized as “network printers”. The home Samsung CLP-300 is also recognized out of the box. The Epson V300 perfection photo scanner needs drivers from here