Hi guys, experimenting in the world of linux i have installed Ubuntu in a dual tri-boot configuration on my Macbook pro. I like Ubuntu but after becoming curious, i installed the latest kde. I soon began to love kde. It is the best desktop i have ever seen. enjoying it so much i began investigating it more on Google, only to find that many people thought the kde experience was limited on several distros including Kubuntu. I looked up which distro's give the best kde experience and Opesuse and Mandriva seem to be the best options. I downloaded and installed Opensuse onto a virtual machine easily and it seems very nice. I am considering removing Ubuntu compleley and moving to Opensuse. Situation; ok, i never mentioned i tried Mandriva; that is because before i ever even bothered with Ubuntu, Mandriva was my first linux choice and experience and it was a bad one. Owning a mac, a system with slightly more unique hardware than a "pc" (to my understanding) Mandriva gave me nothing but problems, even on a virtual machine. Mandriva wouldn't even boot up the installation proceedure. So Mandriva is out of the question.
My question is, how well will Opensuse perform on my Macbook Pro 7.1? I don't want to uninstall Ubuntu only to encounter similar problems to Mandriva.

In my experience openSUSE doesn't do very well at hardware detection, but that's only from my personal experience, mileage will vary.

Boot into the openSUSE Live CD / DVD and you will be able to test all your hardware before installing it. No risk required

Well, if a Linux distribution is going to work on your MBP 7,1, you are going to know fairly quickly because it is either going to boot up just fine, or give you an error right off the bat. This is because of the MCP89 kernel bug, which was fixed recently. The problem is that there are still a plethora of Linux distributions that haven't implemented a kernel recent enough to work, so you will run into problems with various distributions if you don't do your homework. However IIRC, OpenSUSE did work for me when I installed it. Doesn't really matter -- just pop in the CD, see if it boots up. If it does, you should be fine.

Make sure you use your internal DVD drive to install Linux with, otherwise you're not going to be able to install Linux. The DVD drive in my MBP broke, and I have tried several workarounds with SD cards and USB sticks, to no avail.

Well Mandriva booted on my machine. It booted into the screen where you choose to either boot, install hardware detect, ect. But after selecting install it gets to the detecting usb part at the very beginning that normally flashes for a few seconds, and instead of continuing it comes up with an error. point is it booted but not into the install.
about trying to boot live cd, i don't think i can. because macs use a efi boot loader instead of a bios, you have to use an unusual configuration to boot linux, and i'm pretty sure that's why when i try to live boot off cd, it instead boots into my windows partition.

If you install via your internal DVD drive then you can take advantage of the BIOS emulation in Apple's firmware. Google up the MCP89 kernel bug, and ensure you don't use a distribution using an older kernel then what is necessary.

The EFI problem does not apply to the internal DVD drive.

yes but i'm tri booting and have to use refit to transition efi to the appropriate boot loader (to my understanding), and live boot from the linux cd just boots up my windows partition.

When i installed ubuntu onto my computer i used many of these commands on this web sight, (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ma...ro7-1/Maverick) to get my computer to work the way it should. Will these commands work on Opensuse or is their an equivalent web sight for opensuse mac users?

rEFIt is just a boot menu and bootloader toolkit. rEFIt itself does not change Apple's firmware. Anyhow, if you don't see the DVD drive in the rEFIt menu, just press and hold the 'C' button upon starting your computer and it should bootup fine provided you are using a distribution new enough to bypass the MCP89 bug and that you burned the DVD/CD correctly.

About OpenSUSE, those commands will work but you will have to adapt all the package manager commands to work with OpenSUSE, since OpenSUSE uses a different package manager entirely. This means that the commands needing to be changed are 'apt-get' and 'add-apt-repository' (pretty much anything related to 'apt'). Don't forget to change text editors (gedit does not come default on KDE).

all the cd/dvds i've used boot up fine, the trouble i had with Mandriva was after i selected install. I think it lost the dvd drive despite the dvd actually running off it. After i couldn't install mandriva i asked if anyone else had installed mandriva on their mac and no one answered yes. Has anyone installed opensuse on their macintosh laptop?
From what you say lupusarcanus i've become a little confused. I'm still noobish and trying to get my head around the way linux works. I know ubuntu uses 'apt-get', and other distros use different commands to achieve the same thing. What does opensuse use? and what is gedit?

I've installed OpenSUSE on my MacBook Pro 7,1.

'apt-get' is a package manager (how a Linux distribution installs/uninstalls software) and 'gedit' is the default text editor for GNOME. Since you are using OpenSUSE and KDE, the package manager and default text editor are going to be different.

OpenSUSE is going to use YaST to install and uninstall software, and I believe it uses KWrite as the default text editor.

Mandriva didn't work because the latest version of it does not have the relatively new code fix implemented into the latest kernels. (i.e. It is old.)

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Oh, thanks lupusarcanus you've been very helpful to me. I've decided, i'll uninstall ubuntu and install opensuse. If i need anymore help getting it to run right, i'll probably nag you from now on lol