Reboot again while holding Eject (or F12) to get the OS X disc out of the drive. Just “bless” the partition to make it valid for booting: If you did one giant partition, this should be /dev/disk0s1. Once you’re in the terminal, run diskutil list to figure out which partition is your boot partition.
Pop in the OS X install disc (may need to reboot again to get it to boot) and open a terminal once the install disc fully boots.
Reboot again, but hold down the Eject key (or F12 on PC keyboards) during boot to eject the refit disc. It might say that your GPT partition is empty - that’s okay. When refit appears, choose the second icon from the left in the bottom row and press enter. Reboot the Mini again while holding Option (or alt key) and choose the disc again at bootup. I generally put everything in one giant partition as it makes the “bless” step a little easier later on.Įject the Linux CD/DVD once the installation is complete and toss in the refit CD that you burned previously. When you’re done with parted in that terminal, switch back to anaconda with CTRL-ALT-F6.Īt this point, you shouldn’t have any partitions on your disk and you’ll be ready to install your Linux distribution normally. If you’re using an anaconda-based installation, you can get to a root shell by pressing CTRL-ALT-F2. This will instantly erase the hard drive - make sure you’re ready for this step. Hop into a terminal, start parted on your main hard disk and type mklabel msdos. When I installed Fedora, I had to switch the hard drive’s partition table from GPT to a plain old “msdos” partition table. The boot screen might say “Windows” for the Linux CD/DVD, but choose it anyway. While it’s rebooting, hold down the Option key (alt key if you’re using a PC keyboard) and you’ll have the option to boot from the disc when it boots up. Put your Linux CD/DVD in the drive and reboot. It’s really difficult to get this done properly outside of OS X, so take the time to do it now.
This will get rid of the Mac chime on bootup.
Let the person asking the question decide what "works" for Auza: No one really needs your personal opinions, especially if it seems forced.
To some Linux-on-mac users out there, I would like to ask this question: What Linux distro works best with your Mac?Īlso, everyone here ranting about why "Linux works for them" and feeling the need to include their own personal distro of choice, ever just think using mac or windows and even dual booting mac and linux "Just works" for other people? To avoid extreme danger, I’ve been thinking of just upgrading to "Intrepid Ibex" and see what happens.Īs always, any suggestions are welcomed via comment. But since danger is my middle name, I will most likely try Sabayon Linux on my Macbook Pro. Putting this Gentoo-based distro on my Mac can be suicide since I’m probably on my own when I do this. I have great memories using Mepis Linux, so I want to take the plunge and test the upcoming version. Right now, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Fedora 10 will do wonders for my Mac. I dual-booted Fedora 9 and Xubuntu before but ultimately decided to just use Xubuntu since it performed a lot better than Fedora. Like perhaps a distro that can magically help increase the battery life while decrease the hardware temperature when running.Īt the moment, I have a short list of Linux distros that could replace Xubuntu Hardy on my Mac: However, these past days, I've been considering replacing Xubuntu with a distro that hopefully has a much better hardware support out-of-the-box and could unleash the optimum performance of my Macbook Pro. Although there are few minor issues left unsolved, I'm quite happy with Xubuntu on my Mac because it simply works for me.
I've been using Xubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” on my Macbook Pro Penryn (Early 2008 model) for several months now.