Fedora on Mac Mini

esok · #1 17th January 2013, 01:37 PM

This post is intended to be an archive on my efforts to run Fedora on the Apple Mac Mini. I will primarily be working with the 2010 Mac Mini with Nvidia graphics (MacMini4,1) and the 2011 Mac Mini with ATI graphics (MacMini5,2).

The good news is that the installation of Fedora 18 on MacMini5,2 is quite painless. I just used the x86_64 netinstall ISO, used 'dd' to copy it to a flash drive, and installed Fedora 18. Everything Just Worked as far as I could tell, including sound. Wireless worked after downloading ans installing the proper firmware. The bad news is that I was not able to use the proprietary ATI Catalyst driver, which is a show stopper for my purposes. When I install the driver, X refuses to start, and the Xorg error message says something about not being able to get the BIOS. This is with a pure EFI boot; in fact I'm not sure any other type of boot is possible with Fedora 18.

I have had success installing Fedora 14 and Fedora 17 using BIOS emulation (aka CSM booting) by using the following procedure: First install everything as normal. At the end of installation use 'gdisk' to create a hybrid MBR only showing the partition where the boot loader is installed (I do not install the boot loader in the MBR). One final step is needed to use the built-in Mac boot manager. Make a rEFIt bootable thumb drive and use it to start Fedora one time. rEFIt changes something to allow the Mac boot loader to see the Fedora partition. Then you can set Fedora to be the default by selecting it while holding Ctrl on the keyboard. I can install Fedora 14 with either the net installer, the DVD installer, or the live CD. The first two are preferred so I can use kickstart to automate and customize the installation. The only way I have been able to install Fedora 17 is with a live USB media. This is irritating because I cannot use kickstart to automate and customize the install (is there a way to use kickstart with the Live USB?)

For MacMini4,1 (2010) the only way I have been able to install Fedora 14 is to first install SUSE Linux 11.3 and using its boot loader to load Fedora. I have not yet been successful installing Fedora 17 or Fedora 18 on the older Mac Mini.

If anyone has some suggestions on how to get 3D acceleration working on this hardware with Fedora 17 or Fedora 18 please let me know.

monkeypet · #2 18th February 2013, 03:22 AM

Hi all, I am trying to get fedora 18 installed. After many trial and error attempts, I discovered at dd works and the liveusb-creator failed.

Now, I can get the installer to start up from refit. However, the installer will crash after finishing re-partition. I can't seem to get it past that part. My mac mini is currently setup to boot osx and ubuntu. There is free space for the installer to create new partitions. I tried different combinations of partitioning, it always fails.

Can anyone suggest some more hints? I am going to try to post the backtrace when I figure out how to copy the info out.