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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Installation

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Install Boot Loader

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

[edit] Configuration and Issues

[edit] 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

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] References

[edit] See Also

HOWTO Install CentOS on a MacBook Pro

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