MacMini
Installing SME Server on the MacMini (Intel)
Maintainer
Dietmar Berteld
mailto:dietmar@berteld.com
Description
The Apple MacMini (Intel) is a very energy efficient hardware-platform and uses the new Intel EFI technology as bootprom, which is not compatible with the standard grub boot-loader. So no standard Linux distribution would start on the MacMini. You have to replace grub with the older lilo bootloader. With this Howto you can install SME Server on the MacMini (Intel) which uses EFI based bootprom without support for the grub standard botloader.
Requirements
For using SME Server on the MacMini (Intel), you should have the SME install cd and a second cd with lilo as replacement for the not supported grub bootmanager on it. You can download the second cd with lilo as iso image here .
Installation
Assuming you have a standard MacMini (Intel) with Mac OSX out of the box, start with installing bootcamp. Use the standard scheme which is 32 GB. SME will override your partition scheme later. The only thing to use bootcamp is to have the right keyboard table for the later SME install process. Reboot your MacMini with your SME install cd on board and type 'sme' to start the install process.
Press F2 to open a second console and give the following commands:
# echo > /etc/fstab # eject
Change your SME install cd with the burned lilo bootloader cd and give the following commands:
# mkdir mnt/source # mnt/sysimage/bin/mount /mnt/sysimage/dev/cdrom /mnt/source # cd /mnt/sysimage # rpm -Uvh --root=/mnt/sysimage /mnt/source/lilo/lilo* # cd /mnt/sysimage/etc # cp lilo.conf.anaconda lilo.conf # vi lilo.conf
Delete the 2 lines with 'read-only' in it with 'dd-command', save your lilo.conf with ':wq' and type:
# lilo -r /mnt/sysimage
Reboot your MacMini. The standard lilo bootloader starts your server as usual.
Have much fun with the energy efficient MacMini as your preferred SME home server platform !
Dietmar Berteld (berdie)