HOWTO Install Fedora 12 on a MacBook Pro

From Consultancy.EdVoncken.NET

Work in Progress

Here are my experiences with installing Fedora 12 on a MacBook Pro 3,1 (late 2007, early 2008). Most things work out of the box, except for Accelerated 3D graphics (desktop effects).

Overview

Prepare: On Snow Leopard, I used Disk Utility to resize the existing Mac OS partition the harddisk. I reserved about 40GB for Fedora 12.
Install: Installed Fedora 12 x86_64 (the 64-bit version).
Boot: Afterwards, I installed the rEFIt boot loader.

Disk layout

Disk layout is a bit tricky with an existing Mac OS X Snow Leopard installation - I didn't want to lose my data ;-)

Take into account the limited number of partitions: we need to be compatible both with the "legacy" Master Boot Record as well as the newer GUID Partition Table formats.

MBR supports max. 4 Primary partitions, can use Extended partitions.
GPT: more Primary partitions, but cannot use Extended partitions.

Therefore, we can use a maximum of 4 partitions. OK, so where does this leave us?

/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 are already in use by OS X.
For dual-boot, only 1 partition is really needed, but a Swap-partition is strongly recommended.
In practice, you want at least 2 partitions (Swap and /).
You can use LVM, but you'll need a /boot partition outside of LVM because Linux cannot boot from an LVM partition.

We will use /dev/sda3 for the /boot partition, and /dev/sda4 for the LVM partition. Inside LVM, we can create all the logical partitions that we need.

Installation

Download

Use a BitTorrent client like Transmission to download Fedora 12 from the Fedora torrent tracker.
Burn the ISO image to DVD (for example, using the Burn utility).

Prepare harddisk

Make sure you have a proper backup!
Start Disk Utility, select your harddisk. Open the partition tab and reduce your Mac OS X partition size to make room for Fedora. Of course, you need free space on your Macintosh HD or this won't work. I freed up about 40GB for Fedora.
Reboot your MacBook Pro.

Install Fedora 12

Boot from CD/DVD by pressing the "C" button during boot.
Tell Fedora to install in the empty disk space.
Follow the prompts to complete the installation. I chose to install the Office, Development and Webserver package groups.

Fedora 12 offers to create a /boot partition on /dev/sda3. Swap and root filesystem are created using LVM on /dev/sda4. I went with these default options.

Install Boot Loader

After installation, your MacBook Pro will probably reboot into Mac OS X. Log in, and install the rEFIt boot loader.

Configuration and Issues

NetworkDamager

Unfortunately, NetworkManager still doesn't work properly for me. On my MacBook Pro, wireless gets configured but it fails miserably for example while trying to do a "yum update". Downloads stall, DNS queries result in timeouts - the network is completely unusable.

Simple solution:

 chkconfig NetworkManager off
 service NetworkManager stop

Now, you can configure your network settings using system-config-network or by firing up your favourite editor:

 vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
 vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
 
 service network restart
 chkconfig network on

Bluetooth Bluez

With CentOS 5, I could just use "hidd --search" to detect and connect my wireless Apple mouse and keyboard. Under Fedora 12, the hidd utility is no longer part of the bluez package. This is quite a regression. To fix this problem, install bluez-compat:

 yum install bluez-compat

At least my Apple mouse is working now; the wireless keyboard still won't cooperate but I'll look into that soon.

Troubleshooting

The rEFIt boot menu does not show: Try booting with the Apple/Option key pressed. You should now see the rEFIt menu with at least 2 options: Mac OS X and Linux.

"No bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key" error message while booting Linux: The GPT and MBR partition tables need to be synced. Boot into the rEFIt menu, select "Start Partitioning Tool" and follow instructions to sync MBR with GPT.

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