Intel iMac booting FC5

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 00:58 -0700, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> Anybody else playing with a new Intel Mac trying to get Fedora Core working on 
> it? I'm happy to report that I've got my wife's 20" iMac booting under its 
> own power as of a few minutes ago.

I've got a Macbook Pro with Rawhide, but I'm using the kernel from
mactel-linux.org together with a Fedora initrd.

> Still looking into what it takes to get X working -- it works fine in the 
> installer if you've got the latest firmware, since syslinux uses the bios 
> emulation layer, which provides some basic vga support that allows you to use 
> the vesa driver for install, but I'm trying to stick to pure efi.

Yea, X.org bails for me with

 (EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOBLANK: Invalid Argument

I haven't tried that hard yet to coerce our resident X hackers to look
at it...

> At the moment, I'm using elilo to load my initrd and kernel, which are from a 
> custom kernel build, because the stock i686 kernels have no efi goodies 
> enabled. In theory, enabling the necessary bits and adding patches to the 
> latest FC kernel should work, but going that route, the HD wasn't getting 
> picked up, so I still need to figure out exactly why that is, comparing the 
> kernel config from mactel-linux.org to the one I hacked together based on the 
> 2080 FC kernel (both had EFI stuff flipped on and the iMac patch added).

Any chance you can post the diff on the config? And exactly what patches
to use (I'm using the imac-2.6.16-rc4 one with CONFIG_FB_IMAC set)? It
would probably be worthwhile to patch Rawhide kernels too, cuz then it's
probably easier talking davej into taking the changes :-)

Thanks,
David