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Re: Installing Etch on Macbook?




On Feb 26, 2007, at 1:18 PM, Jerome BENOIT wrote:

have you tried with the latest Mactel patch ?
do you run a i386 or an amd64 kernel ?

Sami J. Laine wrote:
Got one of those nifty macbooks a while ago and after peeking at http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook I decided to give it a go immediately. First of all, this particular Macbook of mine seems to be able to run GNU/Linux quite nicely: I started experimenting with Ubuntu and got it up and running without hazzles. So hardware is more or less ok. However, feeling a bit lonely in the jungles of Ubuntuish ease of use, I decided to quickly go back to my distribution of choice, Debian. So, 15th Feb 2007 I burned Debian Etch netinst image and forced it into the SuperDrive tray. Booted. Got that normal "Press F1 for help, or ENTER to boot: " prompt. Pressed ENTER. Twice. A couple of times more. After several tries it seemed obvious that whole system has frozen immediately after displaying the boot prompt. The Macbook section of Debian Wiki refers to some strange keyboard problems resulting double keypresses. However, this is not the same problem since keyboard completely locks up (and thus instructions in the Wiki are unusable since they refer user to type some extra parameters for kernel to boot). Mac OS/X system profiler says my Macbook hardware is of revision 2,1: White Macbook w/ 2GHz Intel Core2 Duo (1Gb memory, 80Gb HD but that's not relevant to the problem at hand I guess).
Any ideas how to move on?

These problems are because of BootCamp bugs. Use an USB keyboard and re-plug it in if it frozes again. It happens only when installing a "Legacy" OS on Core 2 Duo Macs. It doesn't occur when actually running another OS, only when booting it (so also when LILO or GRUB appears, you sometimes may not be able to choose proper kernel or system from LILO's/GRUB's menu). As for now - the only solution is using external USB keyboard. So - the system doesn't freeze, only the built-in keyboard doesn't work (sometimes). Having or not having mactel-patches doesn't matter in this case.


--
Bartek Krawczyk



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