Me and my friend decided to use his Macbook Pro 3.1 (Intel Core 2 Duo A1226) as a dedicated server for personal purposes. Our main goal is to install Debian. However as you might know, installing Linux on Mac can be a pain in the *** (self censor :)). We have 2 extra problems: Optical disk drive does not work, keyboard is broken so he uses Apple's wireless keyboard (which actually works even outside of OS).
We have tried so far, Bootable Ubuntu USB, which did not boot on Mac (by pressing Alt key continiously) We have tried rEFIt and rEFInd, where we could not boot and got the following error: "No bootable device" So we have tried the instruction on this (http://www.rodsbooks.com/ubuntu-efi/index.html) website, where we basically have created a BIOS Bootable Partition and expected to be able to boot Ubuntu Bootable USB with rEFInd, without success. In this case we see 2 options by the rEFIt/rEFInd: 1 Legacy OS Which returns following errors:
2 Ubuntu Here finally we have managed to see GRUB Loader, where we have 4 options (try ubuntu, install ubuntu, hardware (for manufacturers), ...) When we select "install ubuntu" screen goes black and we do not have any reaction and need to restart the Mac.
We have used dd to copy bootable USB to a partition and boot from there with rEFIt, without success.
We were wondering, whether there is another way? We also think about getting the HDD out and install the OS directly there, however EFI will still not recognize GRUB. Do you have any ideas how we can approach to have better chance?
Thanks a lot!