Mac Intel, EFI and Linux Distros.

[greylica]

A friend of mine will go to Europe and he haves an Intel Based Mac he want to sell. But, sorry for him, some people invaded his job late at night and in a robbery removed some of the peripherals of the Mac, including keyboard and Mouse, and the original Box with the CD-Roms and all of the documentation. This Mac was in maintenance in another room, so it's HDD was erased and no Boot at all. The people whose made the robbery didn't take the computer. So, he is leaving Brazil for work on Italy. He want's to sell the Mac, but I didn know if the Mac will accept any other peripheral, I want to test with an conventional USB keyboard and Mouse, and reinstall an O.S. in the machine as well. So I have two questions ...
Will the Mac Intel runs any flavor of Linux and what about the EFI, how it works ?
Will the Mac accept another common hardware like an 8800GTX instead of the original 7300 without problems and accept the Nvidia driver as well?

The configs are here:
Ge Force 7300 GS, 3GB of Ram, Dual Xeon 2.66, 250 GB of HDD SATA.

I want to Run only Debian or Kubuntu. Anyone did this before ?
Thanks for the help.

Oh, a third question, does it worth or it's better to call Apple and buy the rest of the things that was stolen ? ( At least they leaved the buying papers... )

 

[Looney]

If you want to run Ubuntu or Kubuntu, visit the Ubuntu forum... they literally have an entire forum dedicated to Mactels.

 

[Nothinman]

Installing via and booting straight from EFI is still a pain from what I hear, but I don't pay much attention so that may have changed recently. The easiest course is usually to leave OS X on there and use BootCamp to install Linux.

Regular USB keyboard and mice will work fine but you won't have the extra Mac buttons like eject for the CD so you might have to find work arounds for that.

The machine itself will accept the new video card but without a proper Mac firmware you won't get any video until the OS starts up and initializes the card.

 

[greylica]

Yeah, I have learned a lot aboout how to install Ubuntu or Kubuntu. But the solutions I have found starts only with Mac OS-X and the EFI is a pain, sincerely I am thinking if this will really be a case of passion between me and Mac. Parallels and Boot Camp only runs via Mac OS-X. Then I have to buy Software from Mac. We buyed keyboard and mouse for use with the Mac, and most of people are telling me to wait and buy another WS from HP or Dell. Well I saw a supermicro tests here at Anandtech, and for a renderization server with 16 cores and 8 Gb, the price worth a lot. I guess I should wait until a better solution comes from Apple or then from Linux programmers. I am praying for an EFI workaround, if not, there is another person interested in buying the machine.
The Mac has an astounting Internal design, But the solutions to run another OS is still a suck, I will continue searching for a solution.
I still want to run Linux. I Love Linux. It´s like my lifestyle, free and inteligent.
The other problem I have found is to install High end graphics GPU cards Like 8800GTX and HD2900, I cannot believe the Apple is saying the Mac Pro is a Dream Machine and the firmware doesn´t have an update to run with new cards. It´s a Shame for Apple.
Hmmm, should Mac stay or Should Mac go ? ???

 

[Nothinman]

You said that you have the receipt (or whatever "buying papers" means) so I don't see why Apple (the company's name isn't "Mac") wouldn't send you a disc if you call them, tell them what happened and have some proof that you do indeed have one of their machines.

 

[Nothinman]

The other problem I have found is to install High end graphics GPU cards Like 8800GTX and HD2900, I cannot believe the Apple is saying the Mac Pro is a Dream Machine and the firmware doesn´t have an update to run with new cards. It´s a Shame for Apple.

The firmware in question is on the cards, not the motherboard AFAIK. Cards designed for standard PCs have a BIOS compatible VGA BIOS on them so that the motherboard BIOS can start them up and display basic stuff during POST. The EFI firmware doesn't understand that BIOS so it can't start it to display anything. EFI allows you to add modules to it so there might be a way around that by installing something but I don't know of anyone doing that yet. So if Apple had chose to stick with a standard PC BIOS it would have worked fine, but you'd still need drivers for OS X so your card would only work in Linux or Windows anyway.

 

[greylica]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You said that you have the receipt (or whatever "buying papers" means) so I don't see why Apple (the company's name isn't "Mac") wouldn't send you a disc if you call them, tell them what happened and have some proof that you do indeed have one of their machines.

Ok, this pass was done today, ( But I still don´t want to run MAC OS to install boot camp or parallels, in order to install linux )
I guess I have found the solution to run Linux OS on a Mac without having MAC OS-X in there. But I will test only in the saturday, sorry, but I will post the results certainly.

Anyone used REFIL before ? Is it easy to install ?
I will try to Boot from a Pen Drive, install Refil and Boot from Ubuntu and Install it.
Anyone did this and possibly can explain how does it really function and if functions well ?

 

[gus6464]

The new grub that comes with Ubuntu Feisty supports EFI. If you are going to be using just linux there is no need for an OSX install if the drive is already wiped. Just put in the livecd, partition the drive how you want and thats it. No need for OSX at all. Btw in feisty everything on the macbook works, and there are some tweaks you can do for double finger scrolling, right click by tapping 2 fingers on the trackpad. Backlight and volume controls work off the bat. If you want to know more about installing Feisty on macbook go here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook

If you want to have 2 finger scrolling and right click on 2 finger tap let me know and I can explain what to do.

 

[Nothinman]

Anyone used REFIL before ? Is it easy to install ?

You mean rEFIt, but I have no idea.