Fedora 12 on MacBook 5,2

mohaas05 · #1 17th November 2009, 09:43 PM

I downloaded the Fedora 12 i686 Live Cd and tried to boot it off my MacBook 5,2 (mid-2009). And after it gets to the GRUB menu and I select "Boot", it throws me the error "Not Responding" and leaves me at a blackscreen.

A little searching told me that this happens apparently with all linux variants, and the only way to get around it is to add acpi=off or nosmp, which disables one of the cores.

I tried disabling ACPI, and it began to boot, but it took an extraordinarily long time, perhaps 20 minutes. And even then, at the end it told me the X server could not start.

I'm not sure really where to go from this point. I've heard that doing an EFI installation may solve this, but I'm not sure how to do that in fedora.

***Firewing1*** · #2 17th November 2009, 09:52 PM

EFI installations can be tricky to get working properly, if you want to go that route your best bet is to try and create a LiveUSB key with your downloaded live image by using the and supplying the '--efi' argument to the livecd-iso-to-disk script.

If you want to go the regular Boot Camp method, start up the Boot Camp Assistant as if you were installing Windows but then stick in your F12 disk and reboot. When you need to choose a partitioning layout, specify manual layout and format the FAT32 partition which the Boot Camp Assistant creates as ext4. If you install Fedora and reboot, all should be well and selecting "Windows" at boot will start Fedora.

For what it's worth though, your new MacBook supports x86_64 so you may as well take advantage of that - it may help the EFI booting process and in either case, EFI or not, you should notice a small speed boost (at the cost of a bit of extra RAM use).

mohaas05 · #3 17th November 2009, 10:01 PM

Thanks for the info.

I was actually looking to install F12 on an external USB drive, because my internal HDD is too fragmented, i presume, so that OS X refuses to partition it. Of course, I haven't gotten that to be able to do that.

Also, can I run the script in OS X? Or is it Linux only?

***Firewing1*** · #4 17th November 2009, 11:14 PM

Unfortunately it's Linux only. OS X doesn't fragment very much, similar to the Linux ext* filesystems... I can't imagine that's the cause for the partition failure. Are you given an error code? Also, have you tried partitioning manually using Disk Utility? (You can leave the partition layout as "Current" and drag the bottom right your OS X partition to resize it).

mohaas05 · #5 18th November 2009, 12:19 AM

I'm quite sure thats the problem, as that's happened to be before with Boot Camp Assistant, and I managed to solve it by backing up and restoring via Time Machine.

I just installed F12 in VMware, so I suppose I'll be able to do it in there.

BlueC · #6 18th November 2009, 12:31 AM

Couldn't you just install rEFIt to solve this problem?

mohaas05 · #7 18th November 2009, 12:33 AM

I actually tried that. The problem is I think it only works after it has been installed to the drive.

mohaas05 · #8 23rd November 2009, 01:39 PM

I download the x86_64 DVD and tried to boot into the install with it. It got a short ways, then started complaining about the processor (I think SMP). Afterwards it wouldn't even get into the isolinux menu. And when I tried to boot back into OS X, it threw me a prohibitory sign on boot. I had to remove the battery to get it to boot again.