Macbook: Dual Boot MacOS X and Fedora 10

aldente

I am attempting to set up a Macbook to dual-boot with Fedora 10 x86_64. After tries and errors, I have managed to install Fedora 10 on a separate partition, but it is not recognised for some reason, and rebooting just gets you Mac OS straightaway without grub menu displayed. Does anyone have a success story with this set-up?

/dev/sda1 EFI partition
/dev/sda2 HFS+ Macintosh HD partition

/dev/sda3 200MB /boot
/dev/sda4 4096MB swap
/dev/sda5 17GB /

Grub was installed in /boot not MBR during the installation.
/etc/grub.conf was edited to add Mac OS afterwards, no joy... The firmware is up-to-date on the MacBook.

Some people may ask as to why I bother to dual-boot on MacBook with Fedora. Well, I need to have pppd running for VPN access, but pppd just hangs on my Mac OS X 10.5.6 no matter what I do. (It is a shell script for starting/stopping the VPN connection originally used on Fedora). Therefore, I decided to go down this road. Does anyone have any suggestion on this? Thank you in advance.

ethernet

5 partitions there? I think you'll have problems with more than 4. Try 3 primary and one extended/logical for extra partitions.

Or an alternative layout:

• EFI
• Mac OS
• Swap
• Linux (/)

Install rEFIt before installing Fedora to look after the boot-loaders and, yet again, let Fedora install to the root partition.

aldente

Thank you ethernet for your reply. Yes, one of the problems above was the number of partitions, one too many. I had forgotten about this limitation! On the PC platform, the installer automatically caters for this if there are more than four. However, on the MacBook, it seems that you have to mind it yourself.

Having partitioned again with four, and installed rFEIt, the DVD installer successfully reached the initial screen. Here, on MacBook 5,2, you need to supply the kernel boot option acpi=off and apm=off, whilst MacBook 4,1 needs not.

After finishing the installation, alah, despite having the grub installed on the root (/) partition, rather than MBR, and set the above kernel boot options, MacBook 5,2 does not boot! On the other hand, MacBook 4,1 successfully let me log into Fedora 10, at the maximum screen resolution of 1024x768 (too small to work on), even with plenty of available memory.

Mine is MacBook 5,2... so at the moment I am left with no choice but to keep my head down and work my way for a workaround.

Rather disappointed, I came back to my original issue to resolve - pppd over ssh on the MacBook. I found a tool called pty-redir on the web,

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/12/20/vpn.html?page=2

which was similar to what my script was doing, I see the ssh authentication is complete in either script I run, but no joy with pppd.

If anyone has any solution for this dual boot or getting pppd over ssh working on the MacBook, I'd appreciate it.

ethernet

Can't say I'm familiar with your VPN issue.

BTW, after you installed and reboot, when you see the rEFIt menu, choose the option to 'repair' or 'fix' (could be hidden under the console option; really can't remember exactly).

You need to update its partition information after an installation so it recognises the Fedora partition as bootable. Then power down for a few seconds before booting again for it to work as a reboot may not work.