[arch-general] EFI-Support (Arch on a MacBook Pro)

[Scott Lawrence]

My cd writer is apparently dead (gets to 60-80% and dies), so I'll be 
contributing no useful information. Sorry

However, it seems that using an archboot[1] livecd[2] is the way to go - a 
simple install should give you grub2 properly set up, and from there it's just 
a matter of configuration.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archboot
[2] http://cosmos.cites.illinois.edu/pub/archlinux/iso/archboot/2012.01/

By the way, if you intend to go the dwm/xmonad route, I've created a version 
of pommed (the hotkeys handler) with unnecessary 
dbus/wmaker/gnome/ambient-light-sensor support torn out, along with the bugs 
it had. pommed-light in AUR. The main version of pommed tends to sit at 2% CPU 
usage because it's constantly polling the ambient light sensor, and it can't 
tolerate dbus not being running.

Good luck.

On Sun, 15 Apr 2012, Keshav P R wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 23:50, Arvid Warnecke <arvid at nostalgix.org> wrote:
>> Hi Scott,
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 02:54:28PM -0400, Scott Lawrence wrote:
>>>> What I have been wondering about now is, if it will be possible to
>>>> install Arch without rEFIt and the Mac OS X at all? I read a lot in the
>>>> wiki pages, but all I found was that if I install Arch only with EFI
>>>> support I will have to install GRUB2. And on the page about GRUB2 I
>>>> read, that I will have to bless GRUB2 from OS X...
>>>>
>>>> If that is necessary I might keep rEFIt and OS X as it is and only
>>>> replace the Mint installation with Arch.
>>>>
>>> It's my understanding that with linux 3.3, it's possible to get EFI
>>> to boot straight to linux. I don't know the specifics - I mean to
>>> give it a stab early this weekend. If I still have a working
>>> computer afterwords, I'll let you know what happens (provided nobody
>>> else interjects with something more useful).
>>>
>> Thanks, looking forward to it.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Arvid
>
> Just FYI
>
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=136833
> http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/efistub.html
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/16/194
>
>
> rEFInd Boot Manager - better than rEFIt -
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=57632 . Related info at
> http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/linux.html .
>
> Experimental "bless" utility for linux -
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=54847 (needs more testing)
>
> Regards.
>
> Keshav
>

-- 
Scott Lawrence

Linux jagadai 3.3.1-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Apr 3 06:46:17 UTC 2012 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux