openSuSE 11.1 on an Apple MacBook Pro

Meet polyhymnia, my new Apple MacBook Pro 13'' with standard processor and 2 GB RAM. For convenience, the first thing I did was exchanging the 160 GB harddrive against a 500 GB one. While installing MacOS X I already left 60 GB free for an openSuSE installation. If you want to install openSuSE as well and didn't do that, follow the hints on OpenSUSE.org.


Preparation: I installed rEFIt 0.13 on MacOS X. After a reboot, you should get a boot manager, which I actually didn't get.
Opening a terminal and casting the commands (from rEFIt documentation:

# cd /efi/refit
# ./enable.sh

the bootmanager started and let me choose what and where from to boot.

Side note: ouf of curiousity, I deinstalled and reinstalled rEFIt using only the installer and with the third (!) reboot the bootmanager came up miracuosly - without the need to do the steps above.

After that I simply did the normal installation routine of openSuSE 11.1 - ensure, that the bootmanager is NOT installed into the Master Boot Record (MBR) but rather in the partition where your openSuSE installation resides.

Having started the freshly installed system, I recognized the following problems:

• the mouse pad cannot be tapped for clicking, you need to press down the pad
  
• the mouse pad does not respond to multi-finger actions which is a real problem, because you are not able to access the "right click" - there should be fixes around in the world wide web
  
• wireless is not working at all
• you cannot adjust the brightness of the monitor, which can be very annoying in dark ambience since the LED backlight is very bright

Well, I didn't spend much time on that issues any more, since I will try again with openSuSE 11.2. More to come