[GLLUG] elilo and my shiny new MacBook Pro

Mike Szumlinski szumlins at mac.com
Sun Mar 12 10:26:32 EST 2006


Alright, so about five minutes after I pulled my new MacBook Pro out  
of its box, I was already digging for linux solutions for it.  I  
stumbled across http://www.mactel-linux.org and have been using the  
info there to attempt to get up and running.  I was able to get the  
ubuntu/drake LiveCD to boot just fine and it runs quite quickly  
indeed, but I don't like liveCDs.  I want to install something!

Using rEFIt, I was able to create an elilo bootloader partition on my  
internal drive and for all intents and purposes boot linux.  My  
problem comes in with the fact that I haven't really played with  
linux much since I was still at MSU...and that was about 4 years ago  
now.  I stole the kernel from the LiveCD and it starts launching just  
fine, but I believe that because I stole the initrd.gz from the  
LiveCD as well, it isn't going to do much save look in the CD drive  
for a bootable partition once the kernel starts loading.  I'm  
thinking I'm going to need a custom initrd that boots from my small  
HFS+ partition (probably through a LiveFS) into a debian or ubuntu  
installer.  At that point, I'm hoping that the installer will be able  
to see my larger ext3 partition and swap partition and let me get  
rolling.

So now that that is all out of the way, time to get to questions:

1)  How the hell do I create a custom initrd with everything I need  
to launch an installer?
2)  How do I create a LiveFS with all the files needed to run the  
installer?
3)  Am I going about this the completely wrong way?
4)  My elilo.conf file currently looks like this:

image=vmlinuz
	label=macbook
	description="MBP"
	initrd=initrd.26
	append="video=imacfb:i17 acpi=force libata.atapi_enabled=1 init=/ 
linuxrc root=/dev/ram0 pcboot=cdrom"

 From what I can tell,  I'm going to need a new initrd, so that line  
is easy.  Video, init, and root are also pretty obvious.  I have no  
clue what the libata.atapi_enabled, acpi and pcboot functions in  
elilo are doing.  Are they even necessary?

Any help would be much appreciated.  Keep in mind that I can get a  
networked version of DapperDrake up and running from the LiveCD right  
now, but so far have been unable to mount any of the internal HD's  
filesystems while booted from the liveCD (even though parted worked  
just peachy).

-Mike


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