Installing fedora on Mac Book Pro

Fedora 17 provides EFI boot support which makes it possible for us to boot it on Mac. This is a detailed guide on how to install Fedora on your 64 bit Mac Book Pro.

Check if your system is supported

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

If this returns “Firmware-abi” = < “EFI64″> then your system is supported.

Dowloading

You need the 64 bit version of fedora 17 (any spin).

Partitioning

Before you install another system you need to partition your Mac HDD to resize your Mac partition and add some extra free space.

1) Open Utilities

2) Open Disk Utility

3) Select the “Apple HDD” (The top one in the hierarchy)

4) Click on partition.

5) Decrease the size of the Macintosh HD to make some free space.

6) Click Apply

Building your USB

Unetbootin doesn’t work (atleast for me), you can try but for me the bootloader just hangs in there forever. A simpler method, which actually works, is to make your USB using ‘dd’ command.

1) Get your USB’s Identifier.

Run :

diskutil list

Output:

➜ ~ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
 0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0
 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
 2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 399.2 GB disk0s2
 3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
 4: Apple_HFS untitled 209.7 MB disk0s4
 5: Microsoft Basic Data 524.3 MB disk0s5
 6: Linux LVM 99.3 GB disk0s6
/dev/disk1
 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
 0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 GB disk1
 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
 2: Microsoft Basic Data MY USB 3.7 GB disk1s2

Note: I have multiple OS’s installed on my Mac already, so your output might differ mine.

My disk’s name is “My USB” and we can infer from the output that its identifier is disk1s2 , which is in the disk /dev/disk1 [This might be different for your system]. Make sure you get this step right!

2) Unmount your USB

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

3) Copy the image onto your USB

su -c "dd if=SOURCE of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=8M"

where SOURCE is the .iso file, and /dev/rdisk1 is your drive.

Notice the r in /dev/rdisk1

Note: This command takes a while and shows nothing on the screen.

Booting

Now, that you have your USB ready, insert it into a slot and boot your mac. As you see the white screen press and hold the “option key”. You should see a screen something like :-

Select “Fedora”/”Fedora Media” from the list.

Now, you should be able to install fedora like you do it in any other system.

Some Issues with Fedora on mac

1) You can’t increase the sensitivity/speed of your trackpad. There is a setting entry for that purpose but that doesn’t seem to work.

2) Your brightness settings and keyboard backlight settings do not get saved. Every time you reboot you need to readjust them.

3) F* key shortcuts (F1, F2 … F12) doesn’t seem to work. That is because they are already booked to do other functions like increasing volume, brightness, backlight etc, and using Fn + F* combos do not seem to work.

4) Your wireless drivers won’t get installed automatically. I had to download mine and install them manually.

5) The bluetooth mouse support is crappy. I have to restart the bluetooth drivers 5-6 times before I get the external mouse connected. By the way I use Apple magic mouse, which obviously works perfectly with my Macbook pro running OS X Lion.