F17 installation on an Apple Macbook Pro

Zoltan Kota zoltank at gmail.com
Mon Sep 24 07:02:51 UTC 2012


Hi,

I've tried to follow the discussions related to Fedora and Apple
hardware in these lists. Some days ago I decided to try to install F17
on my Macbook Pro. Maybe it is useful to share my experiences.

The initial state was:
Apple Macbook Pro 3.1, a Triple-boot system with Mac OSX, WindowsXP,
Fedora 14, booting through ReFit
For Fedora I had a separate 'root', 'swap' and 'home' partitiion.
My plan was to do a fresh installation on the existing root partition
keeping the home partition as is.
The istallation media was F17 i386 DVD.

1. The system booted from DVD correctly, graphical setup was OK.
2. At selecting partitions I choose custom setup, and selected my
existing /, swap, and /home partitions for installation.
At this point I had to stop, because setup needed a bios boot
partition that I didn'h have.
3. As I didn't want to mess up my partitions completely / to have more
control, I manipulated my partition table out of the graphical setup.
I used gdisk in command line from the DVD. I removed my linux root
partition and created a 1MB Bios boot partition and a new root
partition. The other partitions were not touched. With gdisk I could
set the hybrid MBR as well.
4. Starting setup again, selecting custom disk layout with grub
installed on the boot partition, the installation was OK.
5. However the hybrid MBR of the disk was cleared. So I had to setup
again the hybrid MBR with gdisk. After that I could boot all the 3
systems with ReFit. (ReFit now shows an extra starting icon however,
that seems to start windows or fedora depending on which one was
booted last time. I don't know where comes this from.)
But finally I have bootable Fedora 17 system, hurrah. And my existing
other OS-es survived. :-)

I think


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