Since there are different revisions of each Mac model what needs to be done may also differ.
Just selecting the right Image often isn’t enough.
With Mac laptops its usually boot/install problems are related to:
- Graphic card chip (especially with dual graphic card MacBooks)
- Proper EFI booting.
- Card connecting to the built in laptop monitor(again with dual grapgic card MacBooks)
The command:
dmidecode |grep -i macbookpro
will give you your specific version. If you are able to boot into something that gives you a Linux shell. Try to deduce your model from the wikipedia MacBook version table.
I'm presuming models with the same hardware are of the same revision and hence the same steps should apply.
I've always used the ordinary Amd64 ISO for all installations described below. Not the alternate CD’s which seem to be mostly used for old,pre unibody, Apple hardware.
As long as you have refit installed in OSX, the ordinary Ubuntu live CD or USB disk will present you with a "efi linux" boot option along with a bios boot option"
15" MacBook pro version 5.1 [ two gfx cards 9400 & 9600]
Since part of your question was that you wanted to disable the gfx card.
enter this in your grub terminal when booting:
(You can actually play around with this booting of a usb live cd if you feel like it)
the values to add in grub (just plain , not appending any pre-existing lines already present:
outb 0x728 1
outb 0x710 2
outb 0x740 2
outb 0x750 0
This will disable your card and switch the display over to the correct one.
If your display only turns black. Boot back into OSX and switch what card is being actively used and reboot and try again. Since we don't want to add this to the command line every time to grub to be able to boot have a look at this
15" macbook pro version 8.1 [ two gfx cards Intel 3000 & Amd Radeon 6490M ]
Apply the grub settings above from the 5.1 example to disable the Amd card.
Using the Intel card also has some quirks regarding LVDs timings. Resulting in a yellow back light colour and barely readable / viewable screen in console and Unity. Fixes have been merged to Kernel 3.4 and above. And it works out of the box with 3.5 Kernels.
You need to either need to patch your kernel, upgrade to a newer kernel or simply install Ubuntu 12.10(currently beta) that ships with 3.5 out of the box.
13" MacBook pro version x.x? [ nvidia9400m ]
works out of the box
(My) Steps to success
To be clear, my goal was to actually dual-boot Mac OSX and Ubuntu Server on my old busted macbook. The following steps my be helpful for anyone trying to install a disagreeable OS on mac hardware.
- Install
OS X
at the beginning of the hdd (50Gbs). I have OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (w install disk)
- 50Gbs was my personal choice. This is really up to you
- Install rEFIt and test that it works. You should see it after a restart with some boot options.
- Install Ubuntu desktop using the
amd64+mac
iso. rEFIt should let you boot from the disk.
- I put this at the end of the drive (20Gbs) with the intent of removing it. You may be able to get by using a LiveCD but I had already installed it to explore other options.
- Within Ubuntu (select it via rEFIt), create a partition (1Gb) using
gparted
and then copy the Ubuntu 64-bit Server iso to it. For simplicity, let's say we now have /dev/sda6/ubuntu.iso
Restart and select Ubuntu again, this time before Ubuntu loads access the GRUB2 command line by pressing c
when the GRUB menu appears. Type the following:
loopback loop (hd0,6)/ubuntu.iso
linux (loop)/install/vmlinuz boot=install iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu.iso quiet splash --
initrd (loop)/install/initrd.gz
boot
- You should now be entered into the Ubuntu Server install process. Success!
- At one point, it asked for the CD-ROM which I happily provided by inserting it into the disk drive and then continued the installation process flawlessly.
- I was also able to delete all the unwanted partitions I had created, even the one containing the iso I booted from, without any issue.
I now can boot into either OS (Snow Leopard or Ubunutu Server 12.04.1) via rEFIt.
Also, big thanks / reference to this post about installing ubuntu from iso file using grub2. It was key to my success.
Best Answer
In Ubuntu 10.10, we changed the normal
amd64
CD images to dual-boot on either BIOS or UEFI systems (UEFI, "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface", is a different kind of firmware found on many newer systems). This was done using a technique known as a "multi-catalog" CD - it contains two boot images, and the specification says that the firmware is supposed to pick the one it can best use.Unfortunately, even though Macs use a variant of EFI (an earlier version of what's now called UEFI), they apparently can't cope with multi-catalog CDs, and simply refuse to boot them. This left us in rather a quandary: we needed to support UEFI systems, but we didn't want to drop support for Macs either. I therefore created the
amd64+mac
CD images, which are exactly the same as theamd64
images except that they only support BIOS booting. Macs are happy to boot these in their BIOS emulation mode.(In fact, the name
amd64+mac
is a slight misnomer, because it later turned out that some systems other than Macs suffer from a similar problem - but I felt that a more technically accurate naming such asamd64+nouefi
would be more likely to confuse than enlighten.)While I would love to return to shipping just
amd64
images rather than bothamd64
andamd64+mac
, at the moment there is no prospect of reunifying them unless somebody figures out how to make a multi-catalog CD image that Macs can boot. If you're an expert on this, please do contact me by e-mail.