Salix Forums

I have been trying to install Salix as the only OS on a 5,1 macbook without much success.

I have had arch dual booting with os x via refit on it, but wanted to try Salix without having os x and refit installed at all.

The 13.1a 64 installer will boot fine from a dvd and choosing an automatic install using the whole hdd seemed to have worked, except on rebooting it simply says 'missing operating system' when it tries to boot linux.

I also tried installing with lilo on the root partition rather than the MBR, but this caused some strange errors in the installer about raid.

Trying the non-auto install, the partitioning tool took offence at my drive (fdisk doesn't like gpt), so I tried formatting the whole drive with an 'msdos' partition table and creating swap and root partitions in parted magic. the Salix installer then happily installed to those partitions, but on rebooting the mac gave me a grey folder icon with a question mark...

Is there a way to install salix on a macbook without refit? I have a feeling I am simply missing something in the way EFI/GPT/LILO need to work together, because I must admit I don't quite understand what the macbook actually does when it is booting in bios compatibility mode.

I suppose it might be possible to use elilo or grub efi but according to the refit FAQ you need to use bios compatibility mode to get video drivers working in linux.

But why not dualboot?
Simple, fast & easy - if you install no additional apps in mac os x it takes about 6GB of hdd (no iwork, no imovie etc, just pure OS) & you can use refit.

I guess you need elilo or grub2 to boot on such a EFI system. But that's just a wild guess, I'm not at all familiar with Macs and even less with linux on them.
Grub2 is on our repos, so you could just download the package using wget during your installer session and install it using installpkg.
The actual problem might be setting it up properly. You could try chrooting onto your fresh installation and there run grub-install /dev/hdX, grub2's automatic installation, configuration utility.

Possibly that package might even not work for efi, as I also remember there were some configure options for EFI.