Installation of Debian on a MacMini

I've tried several howtos to install Linux on my mini. None of them worked perfectly. So I decided to document my installation procedure here.

I decided to install Debian to an external USB disk. You need the following for this howto:

• an USB harddisk that is supported by Linux
• a machine with a running Debian

Install EFI boot loader

First boot MacOS. You need to download the precompiled binary tarball from the [http://refit.sourceforge.net/#download rEFIt] project. Untar it as root somewhere. Then install rEFIt with the supplied enable.sh script.

cd
wget http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/refit/refit-bin-0.2.tar.gz
cd /
tar zxvf ~/refit-bin-0.2.tar.gz
mv refit-bin-0.2 refit
cd refit/efi/refit
./enable.sh

Compile Kernel

Now you need your working Debian machine. I am using the latest git tree and some [http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mactel-linux/misc/misc/ patches] from [http://www.mactel-linux.org/ Mactel-Linux].

mkdir MacMini && cd MacMini
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git linux-2.6
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mactel-linux co -P misc
mv misc mactel
cd linux-2.6
patch -p1 < ../mactel/misc/imac-2.6.16-rc6.patch
make mrproper
cp ../mactel/misc/config-2.6.16-rc5 .config
make menuconfig
make

Set up hard disk

Connect the hard disk and create some partitions. The first primary partition should be a vfat partition. It is needed to boot elilo from the EFI bootloader. Because my mini has a lot of RAM I left out the swap partition. But it might be a good idea to create one. Here my partition table:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1          30       30704    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb4              31       38204    39090176    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5              31       14336    14649328   83  Linux
/dev/sdb6           14337       38204    24440816   83  Linux

The next step is to format the partitions:

mkfs.vfat -n Debian /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb5
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb6

The volume label of the vfat partition is diplayed late in the EFI bootloader.

Set up kernel and elilo

For booting the Linux kernel you need the EFI aware version of lilo called [http://elilo.sourceforge.net elilo]. You can get a working binary from the mactel guys [http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mactel-linux/misc/boot/ here]. You need the the e.efi (elilo itself) and the configuration file elilo.conf. Copy them and the build kernel into the root of the vfat partition. As last step you need to adjust the elilo config file. I had to change the root device to /dev/sdb5 and the framebuffer type to mini (instead if i17 or i20).

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
cp mactel/boot/e.efi mactel/boot/elilo.conf /mnt
cp linux-2.6/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /mnt/vmlinuz
vim /mnt/elilo.conf
umount /mnt