MacBook – Will superdrive work on Macbook Air with Ubuntu

macbook prooptical-driveunix

I have a Macbook Air on which I am considering installing Ubuntu 14. I bought the Mac mainly because of the great hardware. I got a live copy of Ubuntu working from a USB stick and I am now just testing to see if everything works. My Soulmate bluetooth device works fine. My external Western Digital USB harddrive works fine. My Apple Superdrive does not seem to work. I figured this might be because I have not actually installed and added the third party support.

Anyone get their Superdrive working under Ubuntu on a Macbook Air?

Best Answer

This issue has been addressed on https://askubuntu.com/q/413882/48105. The OP doesn't report having successfully put his SuperDrive to work on Ubuntu. Here's my experience so far:

  • The MacBook Air SuperDrive does not work out of the box on Ubuntu 14.04
  • Installing sg3-utils through the Linux terminal and then running sg_raw /dev/sr0 ea 00 00 00 00 00 01 "wakes up" the drive. Now I'm able to insert media, view its contents in a file browser and eject the media.
  • DVD playback is not working. Not even the mighty VLC was able to reproduce it. However, I'm still able to rip the DVD.

You can learn more about the issue and how to automate this wake up process here: http://techtalk.christian-moser.ch/wordpress/?p=517

I hope I can edit this soon and tell you can safely install Ubuntu on you MacBook Air and have SuperDrive work 100%. For now, it only seems to be able to open and browse the media files.

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