Re: 64-bit Linux on Mac with 32-bit EFI firmware?

On Oct 30, 2011, at 10:38 PM, Sergio Trejo wrote:

> Thanks tons -- that ought to work out just great (not trivial but worth the effort for those of us with orphaned Xserves)!

It's worth noting that for the moment Red Hat finds their EFI version of Grub Legacy to be more stable than Grub 2 EFI. I myself have converted over to Grub2 entirely and have found both BIOS and EFI versions to work find on Macbook Pro 4,1 and 8,2. In my case I use CSM boot to Grub2 BIOS version when I want a GUI, because of problems with Apple's EFI implementation and video card drivers. When I want to boot off a USB stick and can tolerate text only booting, I use EFI boot to Grub2 EFI. In no case do I use rEFIt anymore.

Anyway, point is you may want to use the Red Hat variant of Grub Legacy that has been modified for EFI, specifically the 32bit one. I will bet you can find a recent one on the Fedora 16 beta netboot.img although a newer one might be available on FC1. Final release of Fedora 16 is in a week if you want to wait. Otherwise I'd just snag the most current version of Fedora's Grub Legacy EFI from an i686 netboot.img and then redirect it to an x86_64 LiveCD or DVD ISO of either Fedora 16 or CentOS 6 if you want a more stable/static operating system to use for a server.


Chris