Re: Changing boot parameters on Debian standard ISO

Hi,

some historical considerations:
 
Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> you will find the folks who keep the old PowerMac's alive at the
> debian-powerpc mailing list
> (<https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/>)

In 2011 the Macs had Intel x86 CPUs. The PowerPC Mac era ended in 2006
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh


> I'm not sure about your technical problems.  Usually you need a
> blessed Apple partition to boot an old Mac.

HFS/HFS+ blessing applies to files or directories, not to partitions.
But indeed some x86 Macs seemed to need a HFS or HFS+ filesystem
which had to be announced by an Apple Partition Map entry.

One can see such a partition table in Debian amd64 ISOs where it marks
the EFI partition with its FAT filesystem. It stems from Matthew
Garret's work to get a bootable Fedora ISO for EFI and x86 Macs.
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/11285.html
But Debian never had a HFS+ filesystem image in its ISOs for which the
APM would make sense.

grub-mkrescue for x86 EFI still creates a HFS+ filesystem and marks it
by an Apple Partition Map entry. But even GRUB's then developer
Vladimir Serbinenko could not tell which x86 Mac generation needed HFS+
for booting, when he submitted the HFS+ code for libisofs/xorriso.
That was in 2012. So i assume that a 2011 Mac boots via EFI, not via
HFS or HFS+.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas