[PLUG] Best live CD for a MacBook

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Wed Oct 10 16:29:01 UTC 2007


On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Aaron Burt wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 06:29:59PM -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> A student in one of my classes has a brand new MacBook and she is 
>> keenly interested in exploring Linux. When I explained about live 
>> CDs she became even more interested. I know zero about Macs, but I 
>> know there are some people here using Linux on Macs. I have a 
>> genuine Dapper Mac CD I can give her, but are there any other 
>> distros out there that have live CDs for MacBooks?
>
> MacBooks are Intel-based.  You should be able to use a standard x86 
> or AMD64 liveCD, though I'm not sure how to convince it to boot from 
> CD. Hm, Google "macbook livecd" sez to hold down the C key during 
> bootup.

Intel-based, yes. BIOS-based, no.

MacBooks all use Intel's EFI rather than a legacy BIOS. I don't know 
all the issues surrounding EFI, but I know that some versions don't 
provide backward compatibility with BIOS-based bootloaders.

Supposedly, newer EFI releases are able to use BIOS bootloaders -- 
grub, lilo, the Windows bootloader -- but you'll probably want to do 
some testing. elilo (http://elilo.sourceforge.net/) is specifically 
built for EFI boots, but I doubt most Live CDs use it.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/



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