Don’t Update Fedora 17 to 18 using YUM on Macbook Pro
Posted: January 8th, 2013 | Author: Aneesh Dogra | Filed under: Mac | Tags: Fedora, Mac | 1 Comment »Fedora 18′s latest Mac EFI images fail to work on my Macbook Pro late 2011 edition, the bootloader just hangs in there.
Its possible to install Fedora 17 on MBP without major issues, and there is a documented method to update it to Fedora 18 using YUM, but please don’t even bother trying. I am writing this blog post after trying to update and messing up my bootloader, so now I can’t even run fedora 17. I don’t blame Fedora for this, they very clearly asserted that the yum method is not recommended and may break things, indeed it did.
This is a blog post to warn you about it, and save you the reinstallation and the data wipeout. Stay frosty!
I suspect the issue there is that grub-efi is actually older in F18 than in the current F17 updates:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-6922
and is missing some of the Mac-related fixes. Here’s the full list of the changes that are missing in F18:
* Fri Apr 27 2012 Matthew Garrett – 0.97-93
- Fix CD booting on Apples
- Work around Apple firmware bug that hangs in uefi filesystem reads
- Really properly fix Apple framebuffers
- Use the GOP mode the firmware gave us to avoid problems with Intel’s driver
* Thu Apr 19 2012 Matthew Garrett – 0.97-92
- Build with -Os
I wonder whether upgrading with update rather than distro-sync, or using –exclude=grub-efi, or even just skipping the grub-install step would work.