Make EFI Booting Human-Readable

[Danielle Foré]

I dunno how, but Fedora shows their icon and an intelligent name when booting with EFI. We should look into it.

[Linus Bobcat (biobunny-exe)]

Are you referring to Fedora showing an icon and label in the Mac boot Selector?

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Okay so this doesn't give it a proper name and doesn't work all the time, but just adding a .VolumeIcon.png/icns file to / on both the live image and the installation seems to work for the OS X bootloader and for installations in refind. It doesn't seem to work with USB devices for refind. I suspect there's some kind of menu entry file we need to figure out how to ship.

[Linus Bobcat (biobunny-exe)]

Macs will only give a proper name to a volume when it finds a HFS+ partition with a few OS X files.

Fedora ISOs include a HFS+ partition hidden to non-OS X platforms. It uses a method similar to how OS X Install DVDs manages to show the partition containing the OS X installer only on OS X while showing the partition containing Windows Bootcamp drivers on all other platforms.

In that HFS+ partition you'll need a /mach_kernel file (which can be empty) /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi (which can be a symlinked to GRUB located somewhere in /EFI), and /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist (just copy one from a Mac and change the description to Linux and elementary). The HFS+ partition doesn't need to be journaled.

With this partition, it also makes it possible to boot elementary OS from the OS X System Preferences Startup Disk panel.

I created and attached a higher res icns as pixel accurately as I was able to which goes all the 512x512 (with 10% padding on all sides).

I hope this helps.

[Cody Garver (codygarver)]

I'll sort this later because I need time to play with it

[Cody Garver (codygarver)]

This is implemented for the install now but not for the installation media because it's a little more complex. Deemed non-essential for Loki.