Yes, absolutely sure. If I select the Mac OSX install DVD grub still loads. My Macbook Pro is 8,1 so I'm not sure if something is special about that EFI where grub overrides it. – Benjamin Bryan Jun 19 '12 at 16:56. Boot from the OS X DVD. Run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select the partition we created for OS X, go to the Erase menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the format, and click Erase. Quit Disk Utility, install OS X (with the necessary options for. Your processor and components), and let it reboot and run through the. Using Grub2 or Grub Legacy per the online documentation from Gnu (or info grub at the command line) is distinct from using Funtoo's boot-update per the manpages via 'man boot.conf' and 'man boot-update'. I would look at the files in the partition for the boot of your mac OS and see if there is any plausible correspondence to a regular linux boot.
This posting documents how I configured triple boot environmentof Ubuntu 9.10 karmic, Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 on ?one of my machines. All operatingsystems are installed on a single physical disk. Grub2[1] boot loaderinstalled by Ubuntu will be used as the primary boot loader. Grubwill be then used to boot Chameleon[2] boot loader whichboots Mac OS X. Grub boots Ubuntu’s Linux kernel directly andWindows by chain-loading the Windows boot loader from the Windowspartition.
Partitioning the disk causes headache and requires some tweakingas we have to install both GUID Partition Table[3]and Master Boot Record Partition Table[4]on the same disk. Mac OS X only supports system disks with GPT. ButWindows doesn’t support booting from a disk with GPT[5]. Ubuntuis happy to boot from disks paritioned using both GPT and MBR. Thuswe have to create hybrid GPT/MBR boot record[6].
We’re going to do the initial partitioning of the system diskfrom within Mac OS X installer environment usingdiskutil(8)[7]tool. Follow the instructions in the posting Create Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard USB installation media forHackintosh and create bootable Mac OS X installer USB mediathat works with your system. Of course if your system boots withthe retail Mac OS X DVD, you can use that too.
Next we have to decide the partition table layout. Wheninstalling Grub 2 on a disk with GPT, it’s recommended to have BIOSBoot Partition[8],[9].With the hybrid partition table in place, you’re limited to only 4partitions that are available to Windows. And two of thesepartitions are reserved (EFI Partition and BIOS Boot Partition) soyou only have 2 primary partitions to configure at your will. Alsoit’ll be difficult to work with the partitioning after we’vefinished with the installations and gotten everything to work soit’s better to do good initial planning.
Grub For Mac Os X 10.8
Ubuntu 9.10 karmic and later install Grub 2 that is capable ofhandling LVM. Since we’re going to install Ubuntu on logicalvolume(s), there’s not need for a separate partition for/boot file system. That’s great!
I partitioned my 600GB disk as follows:
- Partition 1: 200MB HFS+ volume labeled
EFI. Thisis created automatically when partitioning the disk withdiskutil(8)[7].Chameleon boot loader code and support files are also installed onthis volume. This way there’s no need to do any customization tothe Mac OS X volume described below. - Partition 2: 2MB volume for the BIOS Boot Partition. Used byGrub.
- Partition 3: 150GB NTFS volume for Windows.
- Partition 4: 50GB Physical volume for volume group managed byLVM. The volume group will house the Ubuntu installation.
- Partition 5: 100GB Mac OS X system volume labeled
Hackintosh HDfor the operating system, applicationsand user home directories. - Partition 6: ~300GB HFS+ volume labeled
Videoforvideo archive and scratch space used during editing of homevideos.
To partition the disk boot Mac OS X installer and launchTerminal.app from the Utilities menu. Firstidentify the system disk.
In my system the system disk is /dev/disk7. Then Ipartitioned the disk using the following command.
As noted above, this will create total of six partitions. Inaddition to the five partitions listed above, the 200MB EFIpartition is automatically created bydiskutil(8)[7]as the first partition of the disk. I marked the Windows, Linux andBIOS boot partitions temporarily as FAT32 so that the space getsallocated for these partitions. The Windows partition will beformatted as NTFS when installing Windows 7, the Linux partitionwill be added to the volume group when installing Ubuntu and Grubinstaller will use the BIOS boot partition.
The empty, just partitioned hard disk is not bootable and won’tbe even after installing Mac OS X in the next step. But we can copyChameleon boot loader and its configuration from the Mac OS X USBinstaller to the system disk. See my guide for more details about Chameleon. These steps assumethat the Mac OS X installer was created like documented in thatposting. While still in the Mac OS X installer withTerminal.app running, execute the followingcommands.
Create HFS+ file system on the EFI volume and mount it.
Mark the EFI file system so that fseventsd doesn’t keep any logsthere.
Copy the Chameleon boot loader binaries to the root of the EFIvolume. You really need the
bootfile, which is thelast stage of Chameleon boot system and contains bulk of theChameleon code, but it’s a good idea to have the images of thefirst stages at hand, too.Copy Chameleon support file directory
Extrato theEFI volume.Unmount the EFI volume.
Eject the system disk so that you can write to the block devicefile in the next step.
Now you can copy the Chameleon initial boot code from theinstaller file system to the Master Boot Record at the beginning ofthe system disk.
Then copy the Chameleon 2nd stage boot code from the installerfile system to the beginning of the EFI partition.
Bootloader installation is now ready. Mount the Mac OS X volumeso you can install Mac OS X onto it.
Finally, quit
Terminal.app.
Go ahead and install Mac OS X normally on the Mac OS X volume(Hackintosh HD). After the installation is finished,the machine should boot to Mac OS X as we installed the Chameleonboot loader to the Master Boot Record and support files to the EFIpartition in the previous steps. It’s a good idea to create backupsof the Master Boot Record of the system disk at this stage so youcan revert back if needed. You can use e.g.dd(1)[10]in Mac OS X installer shell.
When the system disk was partitioned above withdiskutil(8)[7],it also created the hybrid GUID/MBR partition table. You can nowboot Windows 7 installer and format the partition dedicated toWindows as NTFS. Proceed to install Windows on this partition.After Windows is installed, the machine now boots Windows as theWindows installer replaced Chameleon boot code in the Master BootRecord with its own boot code. No need to worry, we’ll get Mac OS Xback after installing Ubuntu and configuring Grub.
Use Ubuntu alternate installer[11].Boot the installer and proceed to the disk partitioning step.Choose manual partitioning and create a volume group to thepartition dedicated to Ubuntu, create required volumes and installUbuntu there. When the installer prompts for boot loader deviceinstallation, don’t answer yet but switch to the console(Alt-F2). We need to activate the BIOS Boot Partitionfirst. In the following setup /dev/sda is the physicalsystem disk.
Mount the special file systems at the target file system.
Enable BIOS Boot Partition using
parted(1)[12].Unmount the special file systems at the target file system.
Now switch back to the installer virtual console(Alt-F1) and input the system disk block device name/dev/sda and finish with Ubuntu installation.
After installing Ubuntu, you should be able to boot it usingGrub. However, Ubuntu installer and parted(1) havedestroyed the hybrid GPT/MBR partition table. But we can fix thatusing the gptsync(1) tool which is part of therEFIt[13].gptsync package is available for Ubuntu[14],but unfortunately the version in karmic is too old tosupport BIOS Boot Partitions[15].This has been fixed in the version 0.13-4 of the package.Until there’s a working version of gptsync package inUbuntu, you can use the package from Debian[16].When you have a version of gptsync(1) installed whichsupports BIOS Boot Partitions, go ahead and re-create the hybridpartition table.
Ubuntu installer should detect the Windows 7 installation andcreate a Grub menu entry for it. It’ll also detect the Mac OS Xinstallation and create menu entry for that, too. However, that isno good to us since it uses Grub’s native Mach kernel loadingfacilities[17] but wewant to use Chameleon to boot Mac OS X.
So let’s create a custom menu entry that will boot Chameleon.Save the following script as /etc/grub.d/99_local_chameleon and setit executable.
And update the Grub configuration.
Now you should have Grub menu from which you can choose whetherto boot Ubuntu, Mac OS X or Windows.
Unfortunately, partition changes related to Ubuntu installationbreaks Windows on my machine. When trying to boot Windows, I getWindows Boot Manager error screen with status0xc00000e. To fix this, boot to Windows RecoveryEnvironment and start Command Prompt. With Windows 7retail DVD in hand, boot it, choose your language and localesettings and choose Repair your computer. If the RecoveryEnvironment asks Do you want to apply repairs and restart yourcomputer, choose No. Choose Use recovery toolsthat can help fix problems starting Windows and then clckCommand Prompt. In the Command Prompt find the drive thatcontains the Windows installation. Most likely it’sC:. Run the following commands to repair Windows BootCatalog.
It should now be possible to boot Windows from the Grub bootmenu.
- [1] GNU GRUB - GRUB 2 / http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html
- [2] Chameleon / http://chameleon.osx86.hu
- [3] GUID Partition Table at Wikipedia / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
- [4] Master boot record at Wikipedia / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
- [5] Windows and GPT FAQ / http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_FAQ.mspx
- [6] Hybrid MBRs / http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html
- [7] diskutil(8) Mac OS X Manual Page / http://developer.apple.com/Mac/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/diskutil.8.html
- [8] http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition / GRUB Wiki: BIOS BootPartition
- [9] BIOS Boot Partition (GPT) at Wikipedia / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_Boot_Partition_(GPT)
- [10] dd(1) Mac OS X Manual Page / http://developer.apple.com/Mac/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/dd.1.html
- [11] Complete Download Options List, Alternate installer details /http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#alternate
- [12] GNU Parted / http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/
- [13] rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit / http://refit.sourceforge.net
- [14] Details of package gptsync in karmic / http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/gptsync
- [15] Debian Bug report logs: #545190 - gptsync fails on finding aBIOS Boot Partition / http://bugs.debian.org/545190
- [16] Details of package gptsync in squeeze / http://packages.debian.org/testing/gptsync
- [17] GRUB Wiki: XNUSupport / http://grub.enbug.org/XNUSupport
It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. I learned some lessons. I’m going to make it a lot easier for you to install Linux on your old PPC Macs.
I’ve experimented with Linux and BSD Macs going back to the Mac IIci era, and I’ve never had much luck. Back in the olden days, Linux was a text-based operating system similar to MS-DOS. Everything was handled through the command line in the late 1990s. This time around I wanted to create a “live” flash drive so I could make sure it actually worked before committing to installing Linux on a hard drive.
If only I’d had a blank CD-R or DVD-R, it would have been a lot easier!
My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin.
Pick a Distro
Step one is to choose your distribution. After talking with others in our small-but-growing Linux PPC Facebook group, I settled on Lubuntu as a good starting point. Lubuntu is known for having a lighter-weight user interface, LXDE – similar to what Simon Royal used when he put LXLE on an old PC.
Ubuntu Linux has a simple numbering scheme for its versions. Version 14.04 was released in the 4th month of 2014, and 16.04 in the 4th month of 2016. That’s also the latest version available for PowerPC at present. You can download 14.04 and 16.04 from this page, earlier versions from this page, where you can also get version 12.04 for PowerPC, among many other architectures.
PowerPC distros prior to version 12.04 have separate 32-bit and 64-bit installers. The only PowerPC Macs that can use a 64-bit operating system are G5 iMacs and Power Macs. Anything before G5 can only use a 32-bit Linux. Starting with version 12.04 the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are part of the same package for Macs.
I suggest you start by downloading Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) desktop CD, which is designed to be burnt to a CD-R and give you a fully bootable way to test out Linux before you commit to it. That’s fine if you have blank CD-R media or a CD-RW disc, but I haven’t burnt a CD in years and have no blanks at present.
That was also the biggest reason I had problems. Using a USB Flash Drive was an exercise in frustration.
The USB Flash Drive Problem
I do, however, have a few 8 GB and larger USB flash drives, and there are plenty of instructions online for properly formatting the flash drive and getting the bootable ISO installed. And none of them worked on my Power Mac G5. I would spend hours trying this, that, and the other thing. Formatting the flash drive was the easy part; installing the ISO and creating a bootable system stumped me.
The only method I found that worked for creating a bootable USB flash drive with Lubuntu on it required me to use Etcher, a freeware app that takes an ISO and creates a bootable flash drive from it. However, Etcher doesn’t run on PowerPC Macs. Nor does it run on my Intel Macs with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I had to use one of my Macs with OS X 10.11 El Capitan installed, and that did the job.
In other words, you need a fairly modern Mac to create the bootable flash drive you need to launch Linux on PowerPC Macs.
I formatted the flash drive as FAT, exFAT, HFS+, Apple Partition Map, GUID Partition Map, and Master Boot Record. Etcher dutifully imaged the ISO file to the flash drive. But it wouldn’t boot.
The key is to format the flash drive using Master Boot Record and FAT. Those are not the default settings, so you’ll have to find them in your version of Disk Utility.
But It Won’t Boot
I’ve been a spoiled Mac user since 1986, and if I’d had a CD-R or DVD-R, this would have been easy. Start your Mac, hold down the C key, and it will boot from whatever is in your optical drive. That goes back to the first Macs with built-in CD-ROM drives. It’s easy, but there’s nothing nearly as easy for booting from a USB flash drive.
On most Macs, if you hold down the Option key (marked Opt on some Mac keyboards, Alt on Windows keyboard) at startup, your Mac will present you with all the bootable options on your computer. On my Power Mac G5, the options are OS X 10.4.11 Tiger, 10.4.11 Tiger Server, and 10.5.8 Leopard.
If I’d had an external USB or FireWire drive, it would have shown up as well. But no matter what I did, the USB thumb drive never showed up as an option. I couldn’t boot from it in the traditional way.
Open Firmware
Whatever the reason, my last generation Power Mac G5 will only boot from the flash drive if I startup in Open Firmware. Hold down Cmd, Opt, O, and F at startup and hold them down until text appears on the upper left corner of your display. Your modern Mac be in Open Firmware (OF, as in two of the keys you hold down to boot into it). OF is a low-level operating system with a command line interface, like the Apple II+ at work that was the first computer I used, the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 that I used at home because they fit my low-end budget, and that Zenith Z-151 PC running MS-DOS 3.3 circa 1987.
Launch OF. That can take a while, as OF tests all your system memory every time you launch it. Just hold those 4 keys down until OF tells you to let go of them.
As long as you only have one bootable USB device, such as the flash drive with Lubuntu or an external CD-ROM or DVD drive, you can type in the following to boot from that device on a dual-core Power Mac G5:
Install Grub Mac Os X
boot ud:,:tbxi
and then hit Return or Enter. That worked perfectly with my Late 2005 Power Mac G5, but it would not work with my older 2.0 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5s no matter what I did, and I didn’t bother to try it on an iMac G5.
If you have more than one bootable device, type devalias at the prompt, hit Return, and you will see a lengthy list of devices like this.
That was a bit of a rabbit trail for me. In the end I found the command that let me boot from the front USB port on my older Power Mac G5 – these are all equivalent:
boot usb2/disk@1:2,yaboot
boot usb2/disk:2,yaboot
boot usb2/@1:2,yaboot
But that only worked on one of my Power Mac G5s. The other three I tried simply would not boot from the flash drive. This was an exercise in frustration!
Making a Bootable Linux Hard Drive
Once I saw that Lubuntu ran decently on my ancient Power Mac G5 Dual, I knew that I wanted to install it on a hard drive so it would boot more quickly and allow me to add more software. That would have been easy on the Dual, but I didn’t want to reformat either of its hard drives, so I went through my small collection of older Power Mac G5 models in search of one that would boot from the flash drive so I could easily reformat its hard drive and install Lubuntu.
When I finally got one up and running – the third one I tried (the first one wouldn’t even boot, the second wouldn’t boot from the flash drive) – I started the installer. I really appreciate the concise, thorough, helpful explanations of what each choice means. It’s the kind of polish we don’t see with the Mac OS; Apple knows that most of us just want it to run. Ubuntu knows that we are interested in making informed decisions and that it needs to educate us through the process. Nice!
Or so it seemed. Then it wanted to upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04, but every time I tried to do that, it nattered at me about removing certain files using sudo and compressing other files – neither of which I am able to do. How can I remove 35.6 M of files when I don’t even know what’s necessary?
Okay, I should have just started with the Lubuntu 16.04 ISO, but I didn’t know it at the time. If you want to try Linux on a PowerPC Mac, choose the 16.04 Long Term Release (LTR) version and be done with big upgrades until the next LTR version, probably in April 2018.
If you’re just experimenting, you might want to use Lubuntu 17.04. And if you’re patient, you might want to wait until April when Lubuntu 18.04 LTR is due.
Lesson Learned: Burn a Disc Instead!
I wanted you to understand the frustration of trying to do things with a USB flash drive before telling you to bite the bullet and burn a DVD-R disk with the distro of your choosing. You can burn a CD-R, but that usually means trimming the Linux distro to fit on a disc. With DVD-R you’ve got lots of room for distros approaching 1 GB in size.
And you don’t have to use Open Firmware at all.
Booting from the DVD-R was a breeze after all the frustration I had to deal with creating a bootable flash drive and then actually booting from it. I wiped the 80 GB drive in a 2.0 GHz dual-processor Power Mac G5 with 3 GB RAM and installed Lubuntu. I ended up with a very nice, friendly, functional Linux machine that lets me run the latest version of Firefox on a 2005 Power Mac that was left behind with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard shipped in August 2009.
Is It Practical?
There are two questions to address here: Is it practical to continue using PowerPC Macs in 2018? And is it practical to run Linux on PowerPC Macs instead of OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard?
Hardware
For those who have a Power Mac G5 Quad, the last and most powerful PowerPC Mac ever, the answer is a resounding yes. With four cores running at 2.5 GHz, you’ve got comparable power to the earliest 4-core Mac Pro. This is lustworthy hardware, although not especially practical in terms of the current it draws.
Dual-processor and dual-core Power Mac G5s are competent performers, and the faster dual-processor Power Mac G4 machines are solid workhorses as well with decent amounts of power. I wouldn’t want to use a Power Mac below 800 MHz or so with Tiger or Leopard, but dual 733 MHz or faster CPUs work well enough.
There may be tasks where processing power isn’t an issue, perhaps a home file server or web server, and there even a 233 MHz iMac G3 may provide all the power you need. Using MAMP, Tiger and Leopard can be configured as Unix servers.
Operating System
If you’re wed to Mac software, Linux probably isn’t going to be on our daily driver Mac. There is a whole learning curve going to a different operating system and using primarily free open source software that may have the power of commercial apps – but you need to figure out how to access it.
But if you want to set up a machine with an up-to-date operating system and browser that can be used more like a Chromebook than a Mac, Linux could be for you. Firefox is a staple in the Linux world, and the latest version is fast with a reduced memory footprint. I can run it on my Power Mac G5 Dual nicely. Not as nicely as a 3 GHz Core i3 iMac, but nicely nonetheless.
Fix Grub Mac Os X
Honestly, I would go the triple-boot route. Today I put separate Tiger and Leopard partitions on any G4 or G5 Mac I set up, usually with Leopard getting 2-3 times as much space as Tiger, depending on the size of the hard drive. To learn to live in the Linux world, I would go with two hard drives when possible – one just for Linux, which likes to partition its hard drive just so – and one with partitions for Tiger and Leopard.
Grub For Mac Os X 10.7
Facebook: Ouch
Facebook is a remarkably bloated environment, and you’ve probably been spoiled with modern hardware or the mobile version. Even on my dual-core 2.3 GHz G5, Facebook is frustratingly slow. You can really speed it up by going to m.facebook.com instead of www.facebook.com. That puts you in the mobile version, which has its own drawbacks but runs a lot faster than the desktop version.
Conclusion
Don’t try to do it on your own. We’ve created a helpful Facebook group of people who have managed to get Linux running on PowerPC hardware and those who are learning how. Linux on PowerPC Macs was invaluable in helping me get this far.
keywords: #ppclinux #linuxonmac
short link: https://goo.gl/anff6h