Arch Linux

stevenplanet

Member

Registered: 2011-09-21

Posts: 19

Arch Linux on a Macbook 5,1 Booting Issues

Hi guys I'm a somewhat experienced "Archer" and have had Arch running smoothly on my Thinkpad X61s for the past few months without many hicks. But my sister got a new laptop and out came this nice shiny Macbook passed down to me. I cleaned it up and it runs Mavericks really nicely, its one of the first Unibody Aluminum laptops from late 2008. Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of memory. Not bad. Now I'm sure it has Arch potential, so I've tried installing Arch on it but the install process isn't as smooth as on non-apple machines. Let me explain.

The Macbooks way of choosing a boot disk is by holding down the "Alt" key when booting, and it has its own Apple menu where you choose each HDD or USB stick or CD. Depending on what you want to boot. Like a fancy boot menu haha. The problem is I don't understand where I install grub in this case. Before I would just install grub on the entire SDA drive. (I'm only dealing with one HDD right now.) I also would like some advice on which partitions to create. Usually I create a 15 GB root partition and leave the rest for home. but It seems that for this installation I have to create a small boot partition. Can anyone explain what that is for? Doesn't grub take care of booting? And this EFI word comes up everywhere I look, whats up with that? I've read through all the Macbook Arch wikis but all the information contradicts eachother a LOT of the time. I was hoping to get a more tailored response here since you guys are such a great community. Can anyone help me with what to do AFTER installing the base package? I know how to set locale, and time and all the routine stuff. But when it comes to installing grub or getting Arch to boot I have no idea. Oh yes, and I am going to be dual booting with OSX so I'm leaving sda1,2,3 untouched. I believe thats how it works. Thanks in advance.

\hbar

Member

Registered: 2014-03-15

Posts: 165

Re: Arch Linux on a Macbook 5,1 Booting Issues

If OSX is installed, then I guess you already have a boot partition (probably 200MB, /dev/sda1). The boot partition contains .efi programs that startup the system.

EFI replaces BIOS on PCs and OpenFirmware on macs (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … _Interface). You might want to consider installing refit or refind (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/REFInd) on the OSX partition (if you just install it into the linux one, it will be disabled every time you boot OSX), to get a more linux-friendly boot prompt.

I installed Arch with an OSX dual boot, and installed grub in the boot partition, following https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … ide#GRUB_2 after mounting /dev/sda1 to /boot .

If you install refit or refind, then you probably don't need the boot partition, since it can find the .efi boot program on your arch partition. Apple firmware will not (I don't think it can read ext4, (the boot partition is formated in FAT32)).

Edit: What I mean is that if you install refind, then you may not need to install the grub bootloader to the boot partition. However OSX will still require it to boot. And refind would be installed on it.

Last edited by \hbar (2014-04-04 08:29:23)