F17 installation on an Apple Macbook Pro

[Chris Murphy]

On Sep 24, 2012, at 1:02 AM, Zoltan Kota wrote:

> 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.

Yeah pointless. Even if no changes to partitioning are needed, parted still overwrites the GPT and nukes the hybrid MBR. You have to recreate the hybrid MBR post-install.

> 4. Starting setup again, selecting custom disk layout with grub
> installed on the boot partition, the installation was OK.

I don't understand what this means. The point of BIOS Boot is to install GRUB 2's core image there. Installing GRUB bits  elsewhere isn't recommended. For MBR disks, it's not recommended for core.img to go anywhere but in the MBR gap.

> 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

Yeah it's fine, but what's intended for F17 is EFI boot which creates totally different partitions, does not rely on either rEFIt (which BTW is no longer maintained, rEFInd is current) or hybrid MBR. But of course as you found, that's only for x86_64 builds.

> I have never
> tried EFI installation of fedora before. Is it possible to install
> grub efi in the root/boot partition during setup? ReFit should find it
> as I know.

GRUB Legacy EFI is installed on its own HFS+ partition, this is unique to Mac installs of F17. I actually don't know if rEFIt will find it or not,but I think it does.

For this to work, you need to let anaconda do it automatically. Custom partitioning doesn't work. So you first nuke all partitions from the previous Linux installation from the GPT, leaving free space. Then have anaconda use the Free Space installation type and it will create all of the correct partitions for Mac EFI boot. You'll even get a Fedora option in the Startup Disk panel in Mac OS. A small limitation is that the HFS+ bootloader partition is named Untitled in the Mac OS GUI. You can rename it if you want with no ill effect.


Chris Murphy