Re: Changing boot parameters on Debian standard ISO

I have a macbook of 2012 (?) vintage, that will boot Mint from a USB drive. It
does have a working version of MacOS install (10.15 I think). I think at some
point Macs stopped being "fussy" about how they booted and became more like
PCs in that they used "standard" BIOS/Boot logic.

At Sun, 31 May 2026 22:01:37 -0400 [email protected] wrote:

> 
> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 2:53 PM Paul Duncan <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > My 15 year old son has found an old 2011 iMac in the side of the road. Long story short is that the processor probably works, but we think the GPU is dead as we cannot get video out of the mini display port connector, or the screen.
> >
> > So, I would like to boot from a Debian live ISO with the following kernel parameters (set in grub.cfg).
> >
> >     console=ttyUSB0,19200n8
> >
> > Now, I can mount up the ISO in loop mode, and get into grub.cfg, but how do I write this back to the ISO so that I can put in on a USB flash drive?
> 
> I'm not sure about your technical problems.  Usually you need a
> blessed Apple partition to boot an old Mac.  I also seem to recall you
> may need to boot to a CD rather than a USB device on some models.  I
> have a PowerMac G5 that needs to boot like that (CD instead of USB).
> 
> But you will find the folks who keep the old PowerMac's alive at the
> debian-powerpc mailing list
> (<https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/>).  Many folks on the list
> are fanatics, and they can probably answer all your questions (and
> more).
> 
> Jeff
> 
> 
>