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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 bootloader.

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 any scheme to partition your MacMini. 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.

	Warning:
	Don't restart your server after the end of the SME standard 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
# 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 and finish your installation with the initial configuration. The standard lilo bootloader starts your server as usual.

Using CPUspeed

Your MacMini supports multiple cpu frequences. Using multiple frequences can even reduce power consumption but without reducing your cpu power. The used frequence depends on the demanded processes. If you give the command

cat /proc/cpuinfo

you can see the actual used cpu frequence. The command

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_driver

ansers with 'centrino', which means that your MacMini would use the centrino driver.

Have much fun with the energy efficient MacMini as your preferred SME home server platform !

Dietmar Berteld (berdie)

MacMini

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