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.
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.