mac help needed

[Chris Murphy]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 9:23 AM, kendell clark <coffeekingms at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/07/2015 02:00 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:55 AM, kendell clark <coffeekingms at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>  I don't own a mac myself, but I'm writing here in case other people do.
>>> I'm a co developer of the sonar distribution, which is basically manjaro
>>> with speech. When I downloaded fedora 23 this morning which I also use,
>>> I noticed that it has on the USB drive  an hfsplus partition with what
>>> looks like a dummy copy of the mock kernel binary  to trick apples into
>>> thinking they're booting a copy of osx. Is there any way I can get a
>>> hold of the source, or instructions on how to add this to  sonar? I've
>>> been going around and around in circles trying to help various people
>>> with their macs and the mac isn't booting sonar. It's refusing to even
>>> try and I know fedora works on a mac because I've used it. Sorry if this
>>> is a little OT for this list but I didn't know where else to post this.
>>
>>
>> Some of this is in the mactel-boot package, source is in koji, and also here:
>> http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/mactel-boot/
>>
>> And then there's various logical bits in Anaconda to create the HFS+
>> volume, and get things installed there.
>>
>> Some of this is documented on Matthew Garrett's blog, you'll have to
>> search around:
>> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/7468.html
>> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12037.html
>>
>> One thing that's also unique to Fedora is the boot media. All of
>> Fedora's x86_64 boot media will boot BIOS, UEFI, and Macs. And that
>> too is non-trivial.
>> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/11285.html


> hi
> Wow, this is ugly. I'm not sure I'm capable of putting anything like
> this together. Guess this goes into the "miscellaneous and unsolvable
> mac bugs" category. Which is less than ideal, because the apple users
> I've tried to help are not known for their patience, while I don't like
> going around in circles. Looks like I'll be recommending fedora
> exclusively for mac users if sonar won't boot
> Thanks
> Kendell clark

Well, if only there were flawless standards and specs, and if only
everyone always exactly followed them, and if there were no bugs.

Apple's way of booting predates EFI, which predates UEFI. And while
some things have changed behind the scenes, for the most part it's the
same implementation, with the same UI/UX facing the user for something
like 20+ years, across hundreds of Mac models.

So the biggest criticism I have isn't really the firmware bugs and
non-standardization, because everyone falls into those traps it seems,
but the fact it's not thoroughly documented anywhere. mgj59 had to
first carve sticks, which were in turn used to poke various Macs, to
discover a lot of these behaviors.


-- 
Chris Murphy