Hey, while investigating possibilities on how it might be possible to install/run something "wubi" like on macs (without having windows installed) I ran into a couple of issues. I post here mainly in hope that one of the folks that actually wrote the code for this or at least have experience with it read this, cause most ppl on irc (while being very helpful) seem to know more about the pure x86/bios/linux side of things.
Besides some (minor?) issues like that the command line freezes/becomes unresponsive after a (relatively short) amount of time and the fact that booting back to OS X (which everyone says should work 100%) does not work at all (it complains that it can't find the specified os x *efi, but it is there, and search correctly finds the right drive) my biggest problem right now is the following: I got some kerne/initrd combo to boot (2.6.26 from debian lenny netinstall iirc) but it gets to the language selection screen, first thing you notice, the keyboard is dead. I supplied "init=/bin/sh" to be able to read at least the last of the error messages. As it turns out to me it seems that seemingly everything pci-related is unavailable. Error messages are as follows: [time after boot]PCI No IRQ known for interrup pin C of device 0000:00:1a.7. Please Try using pci=biosirq [time after boot]ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7 Found HC with no IRQ. Check BIOS/PCI 0000:00:1a.7 setup! [time after boot]ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7 fail, -19 (of course time/device ids and pins (A-D) changed, but otherwise they were the same I think) I tried supplying pci=biosirq although I didn't think it would work, and it didn't, or some solution for a similiar issue from the debian wiki for the macbook (using a usb keyboard) which didn't work either. The usb keyboard works for refit and grub, but not once booted into linux. On some other wiki page it was suggested to supply "noapic acpi=force" and maybe "irqpoll" which I tried in various combinations without a change. The machine I use for testing this is a first generation macbook air. Now while there are numerous reports about people running linux on it (pretty well actually) by providing it with a legacy bios environment, I didn't find a report about one running grub-efi on it successfully to boot linux. The most relevant posts my searches come up with are my own posts on the ubunutu forums. So, I'm not sure who is to blame here, or if it's maybe just my own fault, but I decided that it would be nice to get the opinion/solutions? of some ppl who might be more intimately familiar with the workings of the mac boot firmware etc. and maybe know if this actually has been tested and should work, or not. Thanks for an help in advance. _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
