Properly booting a Mac

[mjg59]

This is mostly for my own reference, but since it might be useful to others:

By "Properly booting" I mean "Integrating into the boot system as well as Mac OS X does". The device should be visible from the boot picker menu and should be selectable as a startup disk. For this to happen the boot should be in HFS+ format and have the following files:

• /mach_kernel (can be empty)
• /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi (may be booted, if so should be a symlink to the actual bootloader)
• /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist which should look something like

  <xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
          <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
          <string></string>
          <key>ProductName</key>
          <string>Linux</string>
          <key>ProductVersion</key>
          <string>Fedora 16</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>

That's enough to get it to appear in the startup disk boot pane. Getting it in the boot picker requires it to be blessed. You probably also want a .VolumeIcon.icns in / in order to get an appropriate icon.

Now all I need is an aesthetically appealing boot loader.

Comments

What's your setup?

[(Anonymous)]

How did you actually get this to work? There are quite of few pages out there how to boot Fedora on a macbook with EFI... but they all seem to say a different thing!?

I created a usb live cd image of fedora 16 (http://dummdida.blogspot.com/2011/10/efi-fedora.html)

I then booted to the live usb image and installed Fedora. Here's my partition table:

/dev/sda1 fat, /boot/efi
/dev/sda2 hfs+,
/dev/sda3 ext4, /
/dev/sda4 swap,
/dev/sda5 ext4, /home

I see that on the EFI System Partition it now has EFI/redhat/grub.efi but when I boot my macbook (pro 5,4) holding alt the only option to boot is Macintosh HD.

Is this extra hfs+ partition required to make my fedora install show up in the boot menu? Or did I install this wrong?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can shed on this. What did you do to get your fedora install to work?

Re: What's your setup?

[mjg59]

Right now there's no automatic stuff to handle all this. With luck we'll be making things work properly in F17. The Apple boot picker menu ignores EFI boot variables - you need a blessed HFS+ partition to get that working.

Re: What's your setup?

[(Anonymous)]

Ok. Thanks. I'll wait for F17.

But for my own clarity... were my mounts correct from above? And this extra hfs+ partition should be mounted to /boot ? is that correct?

Re: What's your setup?

[mjg59]

The extra HFS+ partition probably wants to be /boot/EFI, but we haven't figured that out for sure yet.