[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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