Comment 5 for bug 1464831

On 13/06/2015 18:50, Christopher M. Penalver wrote:
> Michael Titke, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu
> better. Just to clarify, are you able to take your MacBook4,1 when it
> had OSX on it, download a Ubuntu live environment, and install without
> any manual modifications (for example as outlined in
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro9-2/Utopic)?

- It's referred as a MacBook4,2 (like in 2.4GHz which is scaled 2.6GHz) ;-)

- Mac OS X Snow Leopard was victim of an experiment: copied the
/Developer/.../usr/lib/ files to /usr/lib

- I had to visit four stores in Munich to finally find a magazine with
Debian, Ubuntu and other distros on two double sided DVDs (Linux User)

- I was able to completely install Ubuntu from the Live environment
without any manual modification: it left me with a completely unbootable
setup (well, perhaps I even could have used that kernel on DVD / root on
hd trick but that came only later on and was my only working setup for
some days)

- I decided to follow the Ubuntu EFI how to (How to boot Ubuntu from EF...
http://askubuntu.com/questions/91484/how-to-boo... [Firefox didn't print
the last part of the URL - sorry]) but I was not able to make the
firmware boot directly from the hd until I renamed grub.efi to boot.efi
and moved it into the root folder of the EFI partition.

Please note that this MacBook is a bit picky about what boot from an
external drive - the internal hd has been completely unusable for a long
time but before that it was flaky: sometimes gone, sometimes there -
makes sometimes the system hang. No matter how often you selected the
external drive as a boot volume whenever the internal hard disk decided
to come back to life again it tried to boot off it.

During the recent installation of Ubuntu I experienced another
interesting behavior of the Super Drive: after that and that many tries
or changes it would just lock itself: no way to insert any DVD anymore.
Some hours later I could try again. But it locked right before inserting
the DVD for the first time and not only after that and that many tries -
and it was just about finding the right moment when that locking bar
retreated in the drive: it just makes you go nuts. But now things have
returned back to normality.

BTW on a third thought about EFI variables: I checked the manual pages
of Darwin's nvram(8) and bless(8) and now I think there are a lot of
misconceptions about the Mac booting process out there on the WWW

As far as I can tell my current setup with the "boot.efi" file reflects
the EFI standard and should work for a lot of systems out of the box?
GPT partition tables are far more flexible and have less restrictions
than MBR partition tables. This is why I propose to use it as the
default for future releases.