A few days ago I feebly attempted to create a live Linux USB for my MacBook Pro (mid-2010 model). And, oh boy that failed miserably.
While there is no issue booting from a CD, this can cause a problem on newer Mac models that don’t have a CD drive at all. In those cases, simply dd-ing the ISO (or converted to DMG) file to a USB doesn’t work at all. Why? Well, I can’t say exactly why, but essentially, Macs do not use BIOS but use EFI.
If you don’t know, the whole reason why Apple made “Bootcamp” was to support a BIOS emulation layer within EFI to allow booting Windows. While there are some version of Windows Vista and higher that can boot on EFI, they don’t tend to be as supported (driver-wise) as BIOS-booting.
The crux of the issue, then, is that if there is such a thing nowadays as “PC-compatible”, it essentially means x86-compatible and BIOS, and Macs are still not PCs in that sense. So a vast majority of Linux distributions cannot boot as-is on a USB key on a Mac.
I found some kind of solution here that allows booting an ISO file from a USB key with no need to burn a CD. It ripped apart the internals of rEFit to do so, but it seems to work. I said “seems” because there were still video driver issues with Ubuntu, and I haven’t tried any other Linux distro yet, but at least something was booting.
Published on April 11, 2012 at 17:03 EDT
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