but wanted to throw this out for the Slax community.
Was talking to some Mac gurus the other day about booting Linux from a USB memory stick (more specifically Slax) and how no one has successfully been able to do this to date. I turned them loose with my laptop on the Slax site here for a bit, after which they commented, "the problem is obvious... "
Slax is targeted towards BIOS-based PC's that use MBR style partitioning. The new Intel-based Mac's use the newer GUID Partition Table (GPT) and EFI. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table). According to the gurus, one is not able to boot Slax from a USB memory stick unless one can:
1. Format a USB memory stick with GPT partitioning (this can be done in OSX)
2. Make the Mac see this device as bootable (unsure how to do this)
3. Make the Mac hand off the boot process to Syslinux and complete the Linux load
Anyone have any experience here, or based on this info, is this a bridge too far?
In particular the part on "Delayed Boot" and try the commands listed below that section. The section "3" (which I'm pasting below) seems to be the easiest option, though its meant to be only for the hard drive (not sure if it works for the usb drive):
3. A third option to counter the delayed boot is to hold the "Option" key on boot to bring up a menu that can transfer control to the MBR (the menu item will be titled "Windows"). Your MacBook will then boot to the MBR as fast as it physically can with the total time it takes to boot dependent upon how fast you confirm your selection at the menu. Holding the "Menu" button on a compatible Apple Remote during boot will also perform this same function.
jlmcp wrote:
Hm. You wouldn't happen to have a ported version of cfdisk that runs on OSX would you?
Guest wrote:
That coud be to set the bootable flag on.
cfdisk device and toogle bootable and do a write before exit
After much searching on the interweb, I have discovered some things. Hope this is useful to the greater Slax community who, like me, is trying to get Slax up and running on their MacBook. Maybe we can push this a little further along:
How to boot Linux from USB on A MacBook
After months of searching, I found this link which was instrumental to my further understanding the issue above:
You will note that in the section labeled "Setup" the author describes how that in addition to having vmlinuz and initrd in your boot directory, you also need elilo.efi and elilo.cfg. Because the MacBook series uses GPT/EFI vs. the traditional BIOS/MBR, it will be looking for these files in order to boot. It is easy enough to get your hands on a copy of a generic elilo.efi at http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo/, but getting a version compiled that works with your hardware seems to be a bit of a black art.
I am using rEFIt (http://refit.sourceforge.net/) to simplify my boot process, and upon simply loading up any version of elilo.efi and elilo.conf into my Slax /boot directory, rEFIt finally recognized my USB drive as a Linux boot media of some sort (a big step forward!).
Update: Apparently getting a version of elilo.efi to work is not quite the black art I originally found it to be. The problem is, there are essentially three versions of elilo.efi out there at the moment: elilo-3.6, elilo-3.7, and elilo-3.8. rEFIt (my bootloader) is only compatible with 3.6. If you use that rev it will load up just fine. Note: this doesn't resolve the issue below
Does the Slax linux kernel support EFI?
Several sites I reviewed, including one where people attempted to get GRUB working as the bootloader:
all note that " ... the Linux kernel must be compiled with EFI support. Legacy boot is not supported yet." Does anyone know if the Slax 6.0.7 kernel was compiled with EFI support?
Update: Apparently the Slax kernel will support EFI, but the option has not been enabled. (See post below.) The question now becomes, can I recompile the Slax kernel with EFI enabled?
Getting closer. I will update this as I find out more ...
Oh yeah ... (thunk on my own forehead) ... ;-) Extracted the config and noted the option was not set:
#
# Processor type and features
#
...
# CONFIG_EFI is not set
Will update the thread above to reflect, and then ask, is there a way to compile my own Slax kernel? I have seen some threads referencing people doing so, but also thought I read that Thomas doesn't share the sources he uses to build Slax. Can anyone assist?
I am Trying to get it going on my Macbook as well. Tried getting the activator to go and it said path not found or something? Anyone else run into this problem?
Interested in your reply above. You mind notating which modules you enabled in the kernel? I have seen 2, but not as many as 4 or 5. Can you assist?
Just search for EFI - all you need are the two in the config. I enabled EFI and HFS(+) and now I can mount and read Apple HFS+ partitions. Write support is dependent on hfsutils and having the HFS+ partition to be non-journaled and other modifications (see the official Ubuntu forums, there's a Mac subforum).
download .iso (Google it)
burn to a CD (no other way, i know of)
place in cd drive
then restart your mac
old down option key until the CD pops up it will be labled Windows
select that and boot
choose USB assuming there's no other USB media connected it should boot, even if the drive is formatted FAT32
