How to turn a $900 paperweight back into a usable Intel Mac Mini

After creating the aforementioned $900 paperweight, I then spent another few hours turning it back into a useful computer again. If anyone should find themselves wanting todo a ‘from scratch’ dual boot install of Mac OS-X and Fedora, it is actually quite simple….

The first step was to get Mac OS-X back onto the system. So I inserted the original install disk, and held down ‘c’ while turning on the mini. A short while later the Mac OS-X installer is up & running. Before beginning the install process, I launched the ‘Disk Utility’ GUI tool. Using its partitioning options I deleted all existing partitions then told it to create 1 partition of 36 GB marked for a HFS+ filesystem, and leave the remaining 30-something GB as unallocated free space. Quitting out of Disk Utility, I now started with the standard Mac OS-X install wizard, letting it install to this 36 GB partition. This all went very smoothly and 30 minutes later I had fully functional Mac OS-X installed & booting correctly.

Next step is to install Fedora, but before doing this I decided to setup the rEFIt bootloader. The automated setup process for rEFIt installs it onto the main Mac OS-X HFS+ filesystem. I’m not sure whether I’ll keep Mac OS-X installed long term and don’t fancy loosing the bootloader if I re-install that partition. This is a perfect solution to this – install rEFIt onto the hidden 200 MB EFI system partition. The rEFIt install instructions (unhelpfully) decline to tell you how to achieve this, but thanks to Google I came across a guy who has documented the process. Went through that (very simple) process, rebooted and bingo – rEFIt is there, showing a single boot option – for Mac OS-X. So now it is time to try installing Fedora again

Inserting the Fedora CD and rebooting while holding down ‘c’ starts up the Fedora installer. Since I had taken care to leave a chunk of unpartitioned free space earlier, this I could simply let anaconda do its default partitioning – which meant no need to play with lvm tools manually. I had wanted to setup a separate /home, but since anaconda was in text mode there’s no way to add/remove LVM volumes. Still it was possible to shrink down the root filesystem size, leaving the majority of the LVM volume group unallocated for later use. Once past the partitioning step, the remainder of the installer was straightforward – just remember to install grub in the first sector of /boot, and not in the MBR. 30 minutes later I rebooted and to my delight rEFIt showed options for booting both Mac OS-X and Fedora. Success!

Once Fedora was up and running there was only one remaining oddity to deal with. The Mac Mini has a i945 Intel graphics card in it, which isn’t supported by the i810 driver that is into the current released of Xorg. Fortunately Fedora ships a pre-release of the ‘intel’ driver which does support the i945 and does automatic mode setting. So it ought to ‘just work’, but it didn’t. I should mention at this point, that the Mac Mini is not connected to a regular monitor, its actually going to my Samsung LCD HDTV, which has a native resolution of 1360×768. After poking around in the Xorg logs, I discovered that the TV wasn’t returning any EDID info, so the graphics driver didn’t have any info with which to generate suitable modelines. The manual for the TV says it requires a standard VESA 1360×768 resolution. A little googling later I found a suitable modeline, added it to the xorg.conf and X finally starts up just fine at the native resolution. For anyone else out there with a Samsung LN-S3241D widescreen HDTV, the xorg.conf sections that did the trick look like this:

Section "Monitor"
         Identifier "TV0"
         HorizSync  30-60
         VertRefresh  60-75
         ModeLine "1360x768@60" 85.800 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 777 795 +HSync +VSync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor "TV0"
        DefaultDepth     24

        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Modes "1360x768@60"
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

So compared to the pain involved in breaking in the Mac Mini, bringing it back to life was a quite uneventful affair. And if I had done the install while connected to a regular monitor instead of TV, it would have been even simpler. Anyway, I’m very happy to have both Mac OS-X & Fedora Core 6 runnning – the latter even has the desktop effects bling, and Xen with fully-virt working.

How to turn a Intel Mac Mini into a $900 paperweight

This weekend I decided it was way overdue to switch my Intel Mac Mini over to using Fedora. I’d read Fedora on Mactel notes and although they’re as clear as mud, it didn’t sound like it should be much trouble.

First off I applied all the available Mac OS-X updates, installed Bootcamp and resized the HFS+ partition to allow 36 GB of space for Linux. Bootcamp unfortunately isn’t too smart and so assumed I wanted to install Windows. No matter, once I’d resized the partition I could quit out of the Bootcamp wizard and take care of the details myself. So I stuck the Fedora Core 6 install CD, and used the GUI to change the startup disk to be the CD – this was the first stupid thing I did – I should have simply held down ‘c’ at the next boot instead of changing the default startup disk.

Anyway, so it booted into the installer, but Anaconda failed to start an X server, so it took me into text mode installation process. I figured this was because of the funky i810 graphics card so didn’t worry really. Until I came to the partitioning stage – I had a single partition available /dev/sda3 but BootCamp had marked this as a Windows partition – so neither the ‘Remove all Linux partitions’ or ‘Use unallocated space’ options would do the trick. And because this was text mode, I couldn’t manually paritition because none of LVM UI is available. No problem, I’ll just switch into the shell and use ‘fdisk’ and ‘lvm’ to setup partitioning in the old school way. I know now, this was a huge mistake :-) Its not explicitly mentioned in the Fedora on Mactel, but Mac OS-X uses the GPT partition table format, not the tradition DOS MBR style. It does provide an emulated MBR so legacy OS’ can see the partitions, but this should be considered read-only. Unfortunately I wasn’t paying attention, so happily run fdisk, deleting the Windows partition created by bootcamp, and creating several new ones to use for /boot and the LVM physical volume. There was also a wierd 200 MB vfat partition at the start of the disk which I hadn’t asked for ever, so I decided to repurpose that for /boot.

I then tried to setup LVM, but it kept complaining the device /dev/sda4 didn’t exist – but fdisk clearly said it did exist. Perhaps the kernel hadn’t re-read the partition table, so I played with fdisk a bit more to no avail, and then rebooted and re-entered the installer again. The kernel still only saw the original 3 partitions, but oddly fdisk did see the extra 4th partition.

I google’d around and found that the Mac OS-X install disk had a GUI partitioning tool, so decided I’d use that to delete the non-HFS paritions, just leaving free unallocated space, which would let Anaconda do automagic partitioning. This seemed to work – I did manage to get through the complete Fedora instal – but after rebooting I discovered something horribly wrong. The BIOS was still configured to boot off CD image. Opps. No matter, I held down the magic key to invoke Bootcamp, but Bootcamp not only wouldn’t see the Fedora install I just did, but also wouldn’t see my Mac OS-X install. All it offered was the choice to boot Windows – which I had never installed ! Of course that failed.

At this point I burnt a bootable CD with rEFIt on it success I could now see my Fedora install and boot it, but still no sign of Mac OS-X :-( Also I didn’t really want to have to leave a rEFIt CD in the drive for every boot. This is when I discovered that the 200 MB vfat partition I repurposed for /boot was in fact used by the EFI BIOS, and things like rEFIt. Doh. I could reformat it as vfat manually, but to install rEFIt into it, requires some wierd operation called ‘blessing’ which was only documented using Mac OS-X tools.

I figured my best option now was to boot the Mac OS-X install CD and play with the partitioning tool again – maybe this would be able to repair my Mac OS-X partition such that I could boot it again. No such luck. All I managed to do was break the Fedora install I had just completed. The transformation from functioning Mac Mini with Mac OS-X, into $900 paperweight was now complete. I had two OS’s installed, both broken to the extent that neither BootCamp or rEFIt would boot them, and BootCamp offering the option of booting a Windows install which didn’t exist :-)