HOWTO Install CentOS on a MacBook Pro

From Consultancy.EdVoncken.NET

Overview

Bootcamp: On Leopard, I used Bootcamp to partition the harddisk. I reserved about 80GB for Linux (to make room for several Xen instances).
rEFIt: Installed the rEFIt boot loader to make life easier
CentOS: Installed CentOS 5 x86_64 (the 64-bit version, I used 5.1). Take into account the limited nr. of partitions (MBR: max. 4 Primary, can use Extended. GPT: more Primary, cannot use Extended. Therefore, max. 4 partitions).

Installation

Note: the original installation is based on CentOS 5.1 x86_64. Over time, it has been upgraded to CentOS 5.4.
Late 2009, I installed Fedora 12 on my MacBook Pro.

Constraints

/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 are already in use by Mac OS X
For dual-boot, only 1 partition is really needed, but a Swap-partition is strongly recommended. So in practice, you want at least 2 partitions (Swap and /)
Can use LVM, but you need a /boot partition outside of LVM

I opted to have a /boot partition on /dev/sda3, with LVM using /dev/sda4 as a physical volume. In this PV, I created the root, swap etc. filesystems as usual.

The remainder of the PV can be allocated to Xen DomU guests, or used for Snapshot backups.

Troubleshooting

I used rEFIt to sync the MBR and GPT partition tables
The system would not boot into Linux; "Missing operating system" error. The icon for Linux is a "greyed out" square instead of a nice Tux
It turns out that Anaconda silently fails to install Grub (on /dev/sda3, not in the MBR!)
- Install CentOS as usual
- Reboot, notice that system won't boot into CentOS
- Boot from CentOS DVD, go into "linux rescue" mode

 chroot /mnt/sysimage
 grub-install /dev/sda3

Voila, this should fix the problem. Reboot and enjoy your nice CentOS installation!

Wireless LAN

I've had success using MadWifi and wpa_supplicant.

The 'wifi0' interface did not work for me, I use the 'ath0' interface instead.

Install madwifi and dkms (RPMs available on RPMforge)
Set your WPA parameters using wpa_passphrase - this will generate output similar to:

 # wpa_passphrase SSID passphrase
 network={
         ssid="SSID"
         #psk="passphrase"
         psk=28964ba6ea8b8f3a0db1c4414b327da253d0af5d4f4adccec0f8abf5b05b10f8
 }

Append the output to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Enable wpa_supplicant: chkconfig wpa_supplicant on
Test wpa_supplicant by starting it in debugging-mode, and restarting networking:

 wpa_supplicant -D madwifi -i ath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -d

In a separate terminal, run

 service network restart

You should see debugging messages, and if all is well you should obtain a WiFi connection with your access point.

Bluetooth

Wireless Keyboard and Mighty Mouse

Activating the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mighty Mouse was simple, once I figured out how to do it. They are, in fact, standard Bluetooth devices:

 hidd --search

Alternatively, you can directly select your keyboard or mouse by BD (MAC) address:

 hidd --connect 00:1D:DE:AD:BE:EF

Scrolling using the mouse wheel doesn´t work properly yet - don´t know why.

Note: the 'hidd' binary is part of the bluez-utils package.

Hints and Tips

Mounting Mac OS X volumes under Linux

Mount the Mac volume as "hfs+"

Sample /etc/fstab entry:

 /dev/sda2               /mnt/apple              hfsplus defaults,ro     1 2

Mounting Linux volumes under Mac OS X

ext2fsx - Mac OS X ext2 Filesystem - appears to be buggy!

References

Triple Boot via BootCamp

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