The officially official Devuan Forum!

Lomax

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2018-02-06

Posts: 76  

Re: Installing Devuan on a 2007(!) iMac

I think update-grub uses blkid information about partitions, not fstab.

Ah, many thanks, that clears things up!

everything works like magic

Well... Considering I can't even get this thing to boot...

How is it that I can boot in rescue mode and chroot to /dev/sda1 but grub can't boot at all? The disk is clearly there, and it clearly has all the right bits on it. This should be a doddle, surely?

---

"I cannot lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies."

HevyDevy

Member

Registered: 2019-09-06

Posts: 358  

Re: Installing Devuan on a 2007(!) iMac

I think update-grub uses blkid information about partitions, not fstab.

Ah, many thanks, that clears things up!

everything works like magic

Well... Considering I can't even get this thing to boot...

How is it that I can boot in rescue mode and chroot to /dev/sda1 but grub can't boot at all? The disk is clearly there, and it clearly has all the right bits on it. This should be a doddle, surely?

Did you modify /etc/default/grub as ralph mentioned? Then update-grub ?

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,251  

Re: Installing Devuan on a 2007(!) iMac

Perhaps it's worth trying an extlinux boot rather than grub. There's an excellent instruction for this at https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=EXTLINUX, and in general it involves 3 steps:

1. install the extlinux package

2. run its boot loader installer (which replaces grub's boot loader on MBR)

3. prepare the boot configuration for your system

Notionally it follows the same procedure as a grub boot; that the boot loader loads the configuration file, which points out where the kernel and initrd are found, and then it runs that kernel. The differences between them are probably plenty in the nitty-gritty, most of which I don't know anything about.

For your system, I think the configuration file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf could be along the lines of

DEFAULT Devuan
SAY Now booting Devuan using exlinux just like Ralph said...
LABEL Devuan
    KERNEL /vmlinuz
    APPEND ro root=/dev/sda1 initrd=/initrd.img vga=auto nomodeset

Check out https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Config for details and extras. Note that I dropped in a nomodeset kernel boot parameter just for illustration.

extlinux and grub are alternative bootstrap solutions, and while you may have them both installed in the sense of their software and configurations residing on the file system, the one whose boot loader gets installed to MBR (i.e., disk block zero) is the ruling one, and you may as well purge the one you are not using. As always with these things, some people prefer the one and others prefer the other, and many people don't care either way as long as it works.

Final note: the installation disk probably uses extlinux.

DaveT

Member

Registered: 2019-09-22

Posts: 3  

Re: Installing Devuan on a 2007(!) iMac

I run devuan ASCII on a 2006 iMac 6,1. The install is _very_ tedious.
Debian Wheezy is the most recent installer that will boot. Anything later leaves you with a black screen and you can't even persuade the install disc to boot.

Install the most basic debian wheezy possible - about 160 packages. No X no desktop no nothing.
dist-upgrade to stretch, clean up unneeded packages etc.
Then follow the instructions for changing from Debian Stretch to Devuan ASCII.
Then install X and whatever desktop and stuff you want.
I use LILO as the boot loader because I don't need any of the features of grub.

Have a read of https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/inte … ure.48596/ which documents my attempt to get FreeBSD installed and a bit more as well. I did it as a resource for anybody trying to get linux or bsd up and running an an old intel iMac.

The FreeBSD installer won't boot because it can't handle the 32bit EFI.
No derivatives of FreeBSD will boot for the same reason.
NetBSD and OpenBSD work well but no sound. There is a bug in the sound chip that linux fixed a decade or more ago but the BSDS never got around to it!
TinyCore linux boots.
Debian Wheezy boots.
Fedora 14 boots.

kapqa

Member

Registered: 2019-01-02

Posts: 334  

Re: Installing Devuan on a 2007(!) iMac

to install debian on my macmini 2006 i  used "refit" tool first, and then after installation of the linux distro via cd used the included partition tool to update the partition table.
afterwards some linux distro would sometimes not boot with refit, so i installed refind over it (and choosing no to remove refit partition tool ) and then upon reboot would boot linux grub from within refind.

debian SQUEEZE not STRETCH was the best option at that time, alongside with debian wheezy and lubuntu.
ubuntu cd for some strange reason very often didn't get picked up by the apple machine for some reason or did not allow to boot.

Last edited by kapqa (2019-11-19 14:58:19)