CentOS on Intel Mac Mini?

[LinuxLars]

Has anyone been able to install CentOS onto an Intel Mac Mini?

It's a breeze (no pun intended) on Ubuntu with a modified grub.

However, since we use RedHat at work, and I don't want to purchase a license for home, and running Fedora is problematic, I'd much rather have CentOS.

Thanks,
Larry

[arrfab]

Never tried this, but if you send me one i'll be happy to tell you the results ... :-D
I've found this searching the Mailing-list : http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2006-June/066554.html

[hodfords]

Yes - installed Centos 5.0 on Mac Mini - quite easy..... one needs to boot up with Mac installation disc first and remove all mac partition and then when one gets into the Centos installation part - just format the whole drive and then make Grub is installed on the MBR.........

After that just follow steps and then Centos is on your mac mini.

[keithb]

Hi,

I've tried installing CentOS 5 on a Mac mini (intel) I've followed the suggestions above (boot from OS X install CD and remove existing all existing partitions) Booted from CentOS 5 DVD and installed CentOS, I installed Grub in the MBR. The install completes successfully. I reboot but then get a black screen with the words "Missing Operating System"

Any suggestions?


Keith

[Tobias]

Hi Everybody,

Keithb, did you find a solution for your problem?
Me and my mac mini (intel) ran into the same trouble. Installation is ok until the system reboots. Then we get:

Grub loading stage 1.5
Grub loading, please wait....

thats it.

Thank you for any advice.
Tobias

[ritter6281]

I got the same error. I rebooted the mac mini onto the MacOS installer disc, went to the disk utilities, erased all partitions, zero filled the drive, formated for unix, then created a msdos partition, but selected the MSDOS/MBR selection in the advanced screen. The original partition table that comes on the mac mini out of the box is may not support a MBR.

I am not sure that this has fixed the issue, as I was getting the exact same "missing operating system" after centos 5 install. I can post my results tomorrow to this forum topic if anyone is interested.

[Tobias]

Hi ritter6281,

thank you for your help. Centos is now running on my mac mini.
Just to close this, there were two things i had to pay attention to:

1. the harddrive must have a msdos "disk label", since the Mac disk lable doesn't support MBR
- this can be done with the macos install disk or with some disk utilities (e.g. testdisk - witch can be found on the most linux live cds, i had the SLAX LiveCD)

2. be sure that you have installed grub into the MBR (this is not the default choice)


Do you have your Centos/MacMini up and running?


regards,
Tobias

[hodfords]

I managed to install Centos 5 on Mac Mini a few months ago and I followed the exact same steps on a Mac Mini that I bought recently and got the error "Missing Operating System" - it seems that maybe somethings may have been changed on the Mac....

[tmuller]

Intel Mac Mini installation instructions for CentOS 5:

1) Boot Mac OS X install CD. Click on "Utilities" in the upper left corner and select disk utilities
2) Click on the "Entire" disk, select partition tab, then select 2 partitions. click the first, choose MS-DOS (I set the size to .1GB to get it smaller than the 8.XX it wants to leave it at). Then click options and select "Master Boot Record" to support booting other OS (3rd option down). Then click, "Partition" when you are done in the "partition" tab. If you click outside of this tab, you'll lose this information.
3) Once you are partitioned this way, when you reboot, hold down "C" to boot off the CentOS 5 DVD (I installed from DVD, so I don't know if it works with CD's or not).
4) Boot per normal. Partition disks, DON'T DELETE THE MS-DOS PARTITION!!!! When it asks about Grub, make sure to select "Advanced" at the bottom of the window and then next. On the next page, it asks if you want to install in the MBR on /dev/sda, select that one. Don't pick an individual partition.

5) Go through the install, select how you want to build the system. After the reboot, it should just "work". It took it a minute to get to Grub, so be patient. If you see a blinking folder, you missed a step and have to "reinstall" the entire system.

[Westminster]

Wow! Thank you tmuller!! This was invaluable!

I did not need to create two partitions, though. One partition with the MBR configuration as described in #2 worked great for me.