esok
6th October 2010, 05:47 PM
I'm trying to get Fedora 14 (beta) installed on a 2010 Mac Mini. I have had some success with a few workarounds. In all cases I completely wipe out OSX and just have Linux. Here are a few of my findings:
First of all, I could not get Fedora to boot after installation. Both the live CD and the install DVD boot (with the "nomodeset" kernel option) and seem to install, but upon rebooting, it can't find the partition or something, because it just hangs forever. I played a bit with rEFIt without success but perhaps I was doing it wrong. I was able to work around this problem by first installing openSUSE 11.3 in /dev/sda1 (which boots properly on restart after installation) and then installing Fedora 14 in /dev/sda2. Editing the openSUSE menu.lst is necessary to get Fedora's entries. On restart, I can select Fedora 14 and it boots.
In order to take full advantage of the graphics, I install the nvidia proprietary driver. The koji kernel-2.6.35.6-36.fc14.x86_64 (and associated kernel-source and kernel-headers) is required to install the nvidia driver (this was covered in another thread here on this forum). I have also used 2.6.35.6-37.fc14.x86_64 successfully.
Things that work:
- Hardware graphics acceleration.
- Wired network adapter, recognized and configured with NetworkManager.
- Setting time through ntp.
- Setting up a dhcp server on the mac mini.
- Second wired network interface on external USB ethernet adapter, recognized and configured with Network Manager.
Things that do not (yet) work:
- Wireless network adapter. I understand that the broadcom-wl driver is needed. Wireless is not a priority for my needs so this work will be deferred.
- Audio support. I haven't looked at audio support yet, but this is a requirement so I will need to get it working. I have found some pointers at http://www.tuxation.com/linux-on-mac.html, but if anyone else has suggestions I would be happy to try them.
- The machine always hangs when trying to reboot. A power cycle is required to complete. Shutting the machine down works.
- My latest trouble is getting an NFS server running. I am getting a weird error in the system log on the NFS client: "mount to NFS server 'xxx' failed: Stale NFS file handle, retrying." This error even occurs when I try to mount the filesystem on the server through NFS (treating the server as just another client), with "mount -t nfs -o rw,hard,intr,bg xxx:/hw /mnt/hw". On another machine running CentOS 5 (where NFS is working) the above command succeeds.
Does anyone have suggestions about the nfs problem I'm experiencing?
Edit: Audio works by creating a file /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf with the contents "options snd-hda-intel model=mbp55". Actually any filename will work in that directory with the .conf extension.
Edit: I am now using Fedora 14 release version and my NFS troubles have disappeared. Wireless network works by installing the "akmod-wl" package from rpmfusion free and nonfree repositories. The stock kernels also work with the proprietary nVidia driver so no kernel building is required. Rebooting still hangs and I still haven't found a solution to Fedora booting without help from Suse's boot loader.
First of all, I could not get Fedora to boot after installation. Both the live CD and the install DVD boot (with the "nomodeset" kernel option) and seem to install, but upon rebooting, it can't find the partition or something, because it just hangs forever. I played a bit with rEFIt without success but perhaps I was doing it wrong. I was able to work around this problem by first installing openSUSE 11.3 in /dev/sda1 (which boots properly on restart after installation) and then installing Fedora 14 in /dev/sda2. Editing the openSUSE menu.lst is necessary to get Fedora's entries. On restart, I can select Fedora 14 and it boots.
In order to take full advantage of the graphics, I install the nvidia proprietary driver. The koji kernel-2.6.35.6-36.fc14.x86_64 (and associated kernel-source and kernel-headers) is required to install the nvidia driver (this was covered in another thread here on this forum). I have also used 2.6.35.6-37.fc14.x86_64 successfully.
Things that work:
- Hardware graphics acceleration.
- Wired network adapter, recognized and configured with NetworkManager.
- Setting time through ntp.
- Setting up a dhcp server on the mac mini.
- Second wired network interface on external USB ethernet adapter, recognized and configured with Network Manager.
Things that do not (yet) work:
- Wireless network adapter. I understand that the broadcom-wl driver is needed. Wireless is not a priority for my needs so this work will be deferred.
- Audio support. I haven't looked at audio support yet, but this is a requirement so I will need to get it working. I have found some pointers at http://www.tuxation.com/linux-on-mac.html, but if anyone else has suggestions I would be happy to try them.
- The machine always hangs when trying to reboot. A power cycle is required to complete. Shutting the machine down works.
- My latest trouble is getting an NFS server running. I am getting a weird error in the system log on the NFS client: "mount to NFS server 'xxx' failed: Stale NFS file handle, retrying." This error even occurs when I try to mount the filesystem on the server through NFS (treating the server as just another client), with "mount -t nfs -o rw,hard,intr,bg xxx:/hw /mnt/hw". On another machine running CentOS 5 (where NFS is working) the above command succeeds.
Does anyone have suggestions about the nfs problem I'm experiencing?
Edit: Audio works by creating a file /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.conf with the contents "options snd-hda-intel model=mbp55". Actually any filename will work in that directory with the .conf extension.
Edit: I am now using Fedora 14 release version and my NFS troubles have disappeared. Wireless network works by installing the "akmod-wl" package from rpmfusion free and nonfree repositories. The stock kernels also work with the proprietary nVidia driver so no kernel building is required. Rebooting still hangs and I still haven't found a solution to Fedora booting without help from Suse's boot loader.
