Bosch Dieselgate Settlement - W00t!

Thanks, Bosch! We really appreciate the extra money. It has provided us with two new VHF Tri-band transceivers, small whip antennas, a new dive watch, and a few lunches and dinners this week!

We also look forward to more than $2,000 next year for our Phase 2 Emissions Modification payment!

And just today, we received our Phase II emissions modification letter:

 

And, not long after, we have finally received the last third of our payment from VW! This means that we have received more than $7,000 back on our purchase and that we acquired a 2015 VW diesel station wagon for $18,500 new - truly a wonderful deal!

We're going to drive the wheels off our wagen - it will just start to break in at the 50,000-mile mark, and many owners get more than 200,000 miles out of their vehicles.

Tips for Running Raspbian PIXEL on the Apple Macbook Air (2015 edition)

UPDATE: There is a new version of the Raspbian PIXEL desktop for Macs, personally verified to work fine on the latest Macbook Air:

Raspberry Pi Desktop


OLD VERSION:

Great news! There is a GNU/Linux alternative to Mac OS X for older Macs, and i've finally found the right distro!

I've been able to create a viable alternative using Raspbian's PIXEL for my Macbook Air (2015 vintage) on a Samsung 64GB compact thumbdrive.

PIXEL 1.1 Dec 2016 w/md5sums

This is the *only* working distro with wifi, sound, printing, and persistence i've been able to put together for my little Apple notebook. I have tried a number of others - the only other one that comes close is a 64-bit version of Anti-X:

antiX for the Mac

(use the 64-bit version - the 32-bit version did NOT work for me!)

Live GNU/Linux distros are a great way to test before an install. However, the PIXEL distro at this point is only live - BUT, you can create a 'persistent' version on a USB boot stick (compact thumbdrive, sdhc in a carrier, etc.) by following the following directions:
 step-by-step to making a persistent USB boot stick

 Mousepad Tweak

Also, to make life nicer with the Macbook Air's trackpad, i created a file named mouse.sh (made executable by using chmod +x), containing:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/synclient TapButton1=1 TapButton2=3 TapButton3=2 ClickTime=1

The file is saved under /usr/local/bin - then in the file $HOME/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart:

@lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi
@xscreensaver -no-splash
@point-rpi
/usr/local/bin/mouse.sh

This will be used upon log in and provides:

1. button assignments
2. two-finger right-clicking
3. three-finger middle mouse button event
4. tap-to-click

Webcam

Alas, the internal webcam/camera on the Macbook Air is not recognized. However, i plugged in an inexpensive Logitech C270, and it was recognized as /dev/video0 - which meant that it worked in VLC and Cheese. I have yet to explore video chat, aside from crashing firefox-esr when attempting a Facebook video chat (ain't gonna work - may try bumping up to the latest firefox outside of the Debian repos)

Even so, I am quite happy with PIXEL - best out-of-the-box experience!