How can we make F17 be able to boot on Macs (with or without reFit)

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2011-12-06 at 20:32 +0100, Andreas Tunek wrote:

> >> It seems like the boot procedure has changed quite a bit from F15 to
> >> F16, and not just the GRUB2 change. I am sure these were changed for
> >> the best of reasons, but it is very frustrating to not be able to use
> >> F16 on hardware that could run previous Fedoras very well. Also, there
> >> are a lot of Macs out in the wild, and by excluding them we shut out a
> >> large amount of (possible users).
> >>
> >> So what could be done about this? Would it be enough to have a visible
> >> nopgt option in Anaconda? Should we do special "Boot test days"? Or is
> >> something else needed?
> >
> > So, revisiting this: right now it seems like the aim for F17 is to focus
> > on native EFI boot and install on Mac, not installation using BIOS
> > compatibility mode. We should aim to fix any remaining issues with
> > booting Macs via EFI and test throughout F17 cycle to ensure it works.
> >
> 
> Will it be possible to do dualboot (MacOS + Fedora) and tripleboot
> (MacOS + Windows + Fedora) with this method?

If you do an EFI install of Windows (as I believe at least Win7 is
capable of), I'd say almost certainly 'yes'.

If you want to use the hybrid MBR thingy, which as I understand it
allows OS X (and hopefully Fedora) to see the disk as a GPT disk and
Windows to see it as an MBR disk, and do a BIOS emulation install of
Windows alongside EFI installs of OS X and Fedora...er, the answer I
guess is 'I really don't know'. Someone else may. I don't know the
status of this at present and I don't know if, if it doesn't work right
now, we can do anything to fix it.

(I'm considering buying a cheap second-hand Mac just so I can poke at
this mess personally...)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net