Dual Booting on an Intel Mac - Installation Hang (VL6-std)

[yrelyk]

I am a long-time Slackware user (since 7.1) and have recently found Vector Linux. The goal here was to find a perfect distro for my Macbook Pro that is NOT Ubuntu (I really really hate Ubuntu, sorry). But before anything gets on my Macbook Pro (its mission critical) I first test it on a blank disk in the old white Macbook.

While this isn't really solved, I found that the VL6 standard installer will hang at the point in which you are supposed to select the mount points (just after partitioning). The screen is gray and nothing happens.

For troubleshooting, I first tried a different install of OSX (10.6 instead of 10.5). I tried deleting the OSX partition entirely and unallocating the EFI System Partition. Finally, I used gparted to apply a new partition table of the msdos variety. After recreating my partitions (for linux only, plus a small boot partition for rEFIt) and saving, everything worked.

For me, this is actually a viable solution. For others that would still wish to run OSX, this will only work if you clone your OSX partition to an external drive, then clone it back under the new partition table (SuperDooper!). On the Macbook Pro however, I will need to find another option. ProTools won't run on Linux.

I think at the very least the installer should be updated to handle this as an actual error and spit something at the user. GParted can easily handle GPT partition tables but the installer has serious issues with them.

[newt]

An alternative is to try the old text installer which has a better track record on most systems/hardware.

Boot from CD like normal, at the 'boot:' prompt type 'linux' and hit enter (no quotes).  Then see if you proceed with your test installation any better.

HTH!
newt

[yrelyk]

Thanks for your reply newt.

Actually, I tried the light version of VL6, which uses the text installer I am accustomed to from slack. I found that cfdisk, nor fdisk support GPT partition tables. Even with formatting it with Gparted, rebooting into the light installer could not find any usable partitions. I'm assuming it was the same problem with both installers, just a different way of handling the error. That system is working fine with an ms-dos partition table anyway, and my Macbook Pro can work in the same way.

I spent yesterday evening getting the system running, installing a few desired packages such as fluxbox (yes, I am anti-everything), Eterm, wbar, xfe, and Google Earth. I had a fight with the default graphical session manager, which didn't want me to have my fluxbox. So anti-everything me just switched over to the text-based session manager.

Today, I first set out to get the right click function working. I first tried to just use xmodmap, but that got confusing fast since I don't know the layout of my keyboard driver. So I then found the apple touch driver. I found that the driver was already modularized with the kernel, but I had to do some fancy stuff with my xorg.conf to get it acting like a synaptics touchpad.

It's coming along well, and already I have a fully working system that will need minor tweaks. I should admit that the reason I am trying Vector is because while I was with Slackware, I cheated on her with Gentoo...I just couldn't resist the power of emerging things into existence. So Slack and I agreed to see other distro's...but I had to promise not to go back to Gentoo. If she knew i was dating her sister...and loving it.