So far NVidia’s drivers have only complained that the hardware is in use and it can’t initialize. If I try to use any other framebuffer driver besides efifb, I get no display at all on boot and can’t tell what’s going on.

This is the easiest way I have found to create a bootable linux distro into a USB Key, and is working pretty good on PC/Intel machines. But when I try to boot up the usb key from my Macbook “santa rosa”, using The rEFIt Project, it not working for the reason you have already mentioned in your post. I can see that you were able to sorted out this.

Possibly I need an help in order to understand how to modify the already installed Linux distro (into the USB) to meet the requirement in order to avoid the classic bios boot and use instead the EFI one. I can run the Linux Distro into a Virtual box while I am running OSX and change the grub and the kernel, but I need an help to do this.

Thank you Toni

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3031088&group_id=161917&atid=821764

I also never managed to get the STA drivers working, but that was a few months ago, so I may want to try again. You can fix up the pommed sensors in their configuration if you have time and a torch to shine at the sensor, you can adjust it to a good level, I had is responding about the same as OSX does.

pommed runs fine-ish for me. The ambient light sensor is not awfully sensitive, but it’s good enough. As for the bcm4322, I’m using the binary STA driver (yes, icky, but it seems to work if you’re not using NetworkManager).

lm_sensors integration is not great, but the Apple SMC driver does expose a whole bunch of devices, so it should be a matter of adding support. That said, between hddtemp, the nvidia driver and the ACPI thermal zone drivers for the CPU, you should be able to track all the important temperatures.

Ah, a couple of other things: the built-in mic sensitivity is awfully low, and unlike your 15″ MBP, the 13″ has only one audio port, so you need to manually toggle between input and output modes. I’ve yet to figure out if/how this works with the hda driver.

Finally, I can’t seem to get USB suspend to work on a bunch of USB devices (card reader, IR receiver) so battery life is on the lower side of 3 hours. I’d really like to try to see how to improve this.

Do look at efibootmgr as well however.

To do the partitioning I used gdisk, at the time using the bugzilla ebuild (#286535), but alexxy added it to the tree (with a bump) on Dec 6, 2009.

Some notes:

I chose gdisk as it seems to have more advanced GPT operations available than parted, it was more directly analogous to fdisk/cfdisk which I had been using and was comfortable with already, and I preferred to use separate filesystem tools anyway. (The description of the parted reiserfs support didn’t leave me very comfortable, that’s what I’m using on both my machines, with ext4 no journal on the thumb drives, and probably btrfs by the end of this year, so the filesystem support wasn’t going to meet my needs anyway.)

FWIW, for those who want it, gdisk offers better hibred GPT/MBR support, too, tho the documents recommend against it, preferring the protective MBR only. The documents also cover the technology a bit better (without getting /too/ techincal) than parted docs do, I suspect, which was nice learning about it, and will certainly come in handy in a disaster recovery situation, should I ever find myself needing that backup partition table…

AFAIK, kernel EFI support is simply GPT support. No big deal using GPT on BIOS once I enabled that.

Two things I like about GPT: It’s very nice having partition labels in the partition table (I put the same label in both the GPT partition entry and the filesystem label, helps keep things straight), and I LOVE not having to worry about primary/logical partitions any more! =:^)

But I still have to upgrade to grub2 one of these days…

Duncan