Sunday, July 19, 2009

Linux Mint on MacBook

Following the unexplained difficulties I had trying to install Foresight Linux 2.1.1 on the MacBook I decided to try something else just to make sure that I hadn't messed something up making installation of anything at all impossible.
So as I already had the CD of the Linux Mint 7 iso lying around, and Mint was performing very well for me on the EeePC 901, I decided to install it on the Mac.
I chose /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7 (for / and /home respectively) and the install went perfectly after formatting both partitions to ext4.
No problems whatsoever were encountered and I was able to boot from Ubuntu's Grub without any problem.
One slight annoyance however was that, after installing Grub to Mints root partition during the install, two Penguins showed up in the rEFIt boot menu. However, clicking on either gave the same boot menu.
To get rid of this second unnecessary Penguin I ran this command

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda6 bs=446 count=1

which is aimed at zeroing the very first 446 blocks of the root partition where Grub should be installed.
The operation took place without any delay and thereafter only one Penguin showed up in rEFIt.
Another problem that I have not yet resolved is that when the Grub menu appears sometimes (actually perhaps 60% of the time) the arrow keys do not move the cursor allowing an option other than the default to be chosen.
Indeed I have been forced to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to enable one or other OS to be booted. Googling also doesn't point ot this being a common problem.

No comments:

Post a Comment