Fedora ONLY on MacBook Pro

[Kernellinux]

I'm helping a friend install Fedora 16 on his MacBook Pro. We ran the installer but when the computer reboots we just get a flashing folder with a question mark. Can Fedora 16 be installed alone on a MacBook or do you need (bootcamp?) mac software to make it work? Also, can bootcamp be installed without installing OSX?

[hadrons123]

you dont need OSX all the time.you can install fedora wiping out the OSX. you need to change the partition table type to MBR.

[sea]

I know Apple has its own UEFI 'standard's, neither the official 1 or 2 version, but something in between.
But either way, wouldnt a GPT partition table work as fine as a MBR partition table would?

[hadrons123]

Fact: You need a MBR partition table to use LILO/GRUB

LILO and GRUB are BIOS-based boot loaders for Linux. As such, they rely on BIOS functions and the MBR partition table to locate partitions and load the Linux kernel.
The usual way to enable this is to create a hybrid GPT/MBR partitioning. The Boot Camp Assistant and diskutil do this automatically. If you’re using GNU parted, use gptsync afterwards (included in rEFIt, select “Partitioning Tool” in the boot menu).

courtesy:http://refit.sourceforge.net/myths/

[Kernellinux]

Thanks for all the help! When you say change the partition table, do you mean at the Fedora install? There currently is no partition table as the HD was defective and was replaced, so we are starting from scratch.

[chrismurphy]

In all cases, post-install work is needed to get Fedora 16 to boot on Apple hardware.

Apple hardware has firmware based on Intel EFI 1.10, and is in effect a proprietary implementation, and not the same thing as UEFI 2.x. Officially only UEFI 2.x hardware is supported by Fedora and Windows. Despite this, some people are getting certain Apple hardware models to boot strictly with (U)EFI and in that case GPT only disks are OK. But the way the default bootloader is installed doesn't work and you still get a flashing question mark. By default the bootloader is installed on the EFI System partition, /EFI/redhat/grub.efi and grub.conf. This is GRUB legacy EFI.

From my limited experience with a MacBookPro 4,1 (2008) and MacBookPro 8,2 (2011), booting either does not work (kernel panic, initramfs corruption, VBIOS corruption) or works intermittently. It would require way more experience than I presently have to fix this and thus far haven't found any reliable workarounds or recipes for a workaround that allows me to do EFI boot and startup to a GUI.

See bug 765954
See bug 751147

The next option is that most of Apple's hardware (except servers) come with a CSM, a compatibility support module, that bridges EFI to BIOS. This CSM-BIOS mode boot is only activated in certain instances because it was only designed by Apple to work with Windows. But if you meet the requirements, you can get Fedora 16 to use CSM-BIOS mode and things generally work pretty well with some limitations, most notably the lack of good power management. So laptops tend to have pretty poor battery life. This same problem happens with Windows.

See Bug 746901

If you're going to do this with only Fedora 16, one possible easy way out of this without any postinstall work is to pass the 'nogpt' kernel parameter at the installer boot menu. This works for either LiveCD or DVD installations. This forces the creation of an MBR instead of GPT.

There is a consequence to no GPT, and no Mac OS X, however I can't qualify the scope of the consequence. The Firmware.scap file will not be present on such a system, but I don't know what this Firmware.scap file does. I don't know if it's CSM-BIOS related or EFI related.

[Kernellinux]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I can't thank you all enough. @Chrismurphy, adding nogpt at the boot prompt worked flawlessly. Thank you so much to the members on this forum, because of your intellect and willingness to help I was able to wipe out MacOS on a computer and the user is now running Linux only!

Thank you so much for all the help guys!

You guys are awesome!