I even thought of buying a new laptop, but once you owned a Macbook, you're not going to downgrade very fast on that. I've owned lots of good laptops from Asus (great machines - like the M series), Dell (sometimes great, but I didn't like the XPS series), and now Apple (an old Air which overheated followed by a Macbook Pro). The only real machine which might be an upgrade might be an Asus Zenbook, but no backlight on the keys, and without info on the biggest problem -overheating- of these small machines, I won't buy it fast.
Fedora on a Macbook is the best of the software and hardware worlds, so I guess I am waiting for a patch.
(Great, I removed the EFI and HFS+ partitions -all Linux data is backed on a FAT partition- in the hope of getting a bootable system, and now nothing works anymore, except for the Live CD and booting from that. Guess removing EFI was one step too much.)
I can't believe I am still stuck in the 1970's with Apple boot loaders. The thing boots from the disk, by first booting from the Live CD. This might work, but it's for Ubuntu:
- If you have OSX installed, boot to it and mute sound. This assures that you won't be annoyed by the startup/poweron sound afterwards. I even used This software to be absolutely sure. Restart to confirm that no startup sound is audible.
- Prepare rEFIt boot disk (CD-RW).
- Boot Ubuntu install and remove all partitions, partition as you like for your Linux installation. Install Ubuntu, restart.
- Put in rEFIt CD and holding down alt key, boot rEFIT cd. Synchronize GUID and MBR. Restart.
- Insert OSX disc, boot from it, open terminal and enter following:bless --device /dev/disk0s2 --setBoot --legacy --verbose where /dev/disk0s2 is the partition you installed grub (do 'diskutil list' to find out correct partition). Of course, '--verbose' is optional. This makes Macbook EFI firmware boot your Linux installation in legacy mode without long delay (20s vs 3s).
- Restart your Mac (don't forget to remove OSX disc). And boot directly to Linux!
