FC5 - Installing on Intel Mac Mini
 

I'm giving Fedora Core 5 a try on an Mac Mini w/ Intel Core Duo. Anyone have any thoughts on this? This Wiki from Fedora mentions using FC6T1. I opted for FC5 since it's "final".

Is there a way to install anything other than OS X without using Bootcamp? I have no interest in dual booting. Does EFI prevent this? Using a standard Fedora installation, it finished fine, but rebooting just stops at Loading Grub2..

There's talk of Grub supporting EFI with a patch, but how do I get this on a distro's install CD?

Is there a better distro for Intel Macs?

Thanks!

When I had this problem on my PC, it was because FC5 was not installing the boot loader in the master boot record. Certainly sounds like you're experiencing the same problem.

What I did,

(It may be different for a Mac)

I booted to DOS, ran the Fixboot, FixMBR commands, to clean the master boot record and to make sure the previous version of Grub was gone. You could try skipping this step, but I don't know how it would go.

Reinstall FC5. Formatting probably isn't 100% required, but it'd probably be a good idea.

When it gets time to install Grub, I believe I clicked Advanced, and there was an option to install Grub in the master boot record. When I did that, it installed and Grub worked fine.

I'm pretty sure under Fedora, Grub is required, it doesn't matter if you dual boot or not.

IGF

Did this ever get resolved if so what was the final answer. I am struggeling with this right now and it's been a huge pain. Any help would be great.

I don't know what it is with Fedora and installing Grub, but I had the same problem in FC6 also, maybe its a hardware issue, but that wouldn't make much sense to me.

Try the Super Grub Disk... I've never used it, but have saw many sing its praises..

http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org/

Here's a handy grub resource also. The page layout sucks, but it has a lot of good info on grub errors, and how to possibly fix them. Look at the "Common Grub booting errors and how to fix them" link...

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzo...bDiskPage.html

Hope that helps.

IGF

Well I tried to no avail the super grub disk also hangs. Thanks for the advice, super grub does look like a great tool for other systems.

Since the Core Duo uses a totally different bios, I honestly
doubt what you are trying to do will work without some
alternate boot loader like Bootcamp.

This line from the FC6T1 link that you pointed to is telling:

> Autopartitioning will do the right thing with the BootCamp
> created partition and grub will default to being installed
> on the /boot partition rather than the MBR (installation to
> the MBR will cause your machine to be unable to boot)

Since FC6 has been final for a while I would go with that. I
would also investigate whether or not you could use Bootcamp
to only boot FC6 without OSX...

/Les

I appreciate your comments but I do have to go with FC5. There is some software I need that will only run on the fc5 version.

I did get fc6 to install directly on the mac mini without any problems and it's great. It's not dual boot and that's what I wanted. but the software won't work on fc6.

I tried cent os 4.4 and switched to lilo instead of grub and it started to boot fine but I got a kernal panic when it tried to mount root. I am going to try redhat fc5 with lilo and see if it will boot up, fingers are crossed.

I solved this on my intel mac mini.

I installed Fedora Core 5. Then right after I booted up off the CD into linux rescue.

I started up the interfaces. Once I got to the prompt.

chroot /mnt/sysimage

then I downloaded a lilo rpm for Fedora core 3 1386 structure, I couldn't find one for 5.

Then I

vi /etc/lilo.conf

boot=/dev/sda
timeout=5
default=Linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp.img
label=Linux
read-only
root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Notice the last line root=

This is the only way I could get it to boot up. I am posting this from FC5 on a mac mini intel.

Hi RonGG,

I was unable to get this to work. After running lilo with the /etc/lilo.conf you provided, my intel mini fails to boot with a series of filesystem errors and finally a kernel panic.

mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or direcgtory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

This is with a standard Fedora Core 5 installation (I let it wipe everything and use a default partition scheme) + RPM installation of lilo. I tried two versions of lilo: 21.4.4 and 22.6, both for Fedora Core 3.

Any ideas? Did you have to make any additional changes or modifications to your installation besides using lilo?

Thanks for your help

Figured it out with GRUB
 

I figured out how to get Core 5 working with GRUB--it just needs a patch, which you can grab from here. Everything else works right out of the box.

I've written up step-by-step instructions for those who want them.

Yes there was a step I left out, my apologize. After adjusting the lilo.conf you must follow the steps below.

The steps are:

Here's the fix
After almost giving up on Fedora 5, I finally got the fix to this problem.

The suspend signature on swap error, "Trying to resume from LABEL=SWAP-hdd3. No suspend signature on swap, not resuming", can be ignored. It gives this error because when the volumes are activated (look at the output previous to this error), it resumes the swap partition in that step. Therefore, it's trying to resume something that isn't suspended.

The error that causes all the trouble is "mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'". Appartently, in the init script within initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img, the command 'mount /sysroot' is trying to mount /dev/root to /sysroot. Fedora 5 does not use /dev/root like in the previous versions of Fedora. Instead, it uses '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' or '/dev/hda1' (or whereever '/' is located) to mount to /sysroot. For some reason, when init calls 'mount /sysroot', it's trying to mount /dev/root to /sysroot, instead of /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 to /sysroot. This messes up everything after this step in the init process. When it does a switchroot at the end, it fails. After killing init, it causes the kernel panic.

Here's the fix:

1) Boot with the rescue CD
2) Type 'chroot /mnt/sysimage' (wherever it mounts the Fedora 5 partition)
3) 'cd /boot'
4) 'mkdir newinit'
5) 'cd newinit'
6) 'gunzip -c ../initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img | cpio -idmv'
7) 'vi init'
8) Find 'mount /sysroot' (near the end of the file)
9) Delete or comment this out
10) Replace with 'mount -o defaults --ro -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /sysroot' where /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 is the mount point for /
11) ':wq' out of vi
12) 'find . | cpio --quiet -c -o >../newinitrd'
13) 'cd ..' - you are now in /boot
14) 'mv initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.bak' - backup current initrd img file (just in case)
15) 'gzip -9 < newinitrd > initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img'
16) Reboot the computer without the CD

* Steps 4-6,12,13,15 were taken from another site, but I couldn't post the URL. I'll try in my next post.

This should fix it. I'm glad I can finally run Fedora 5 on my box.

MarkCole, I'm not sure if you were experiencing the exact same problems I was with mounting root. However, I hope this helps anyone else experiencing the same problems I had.

Andy

Pulled from this thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...+after+install