Hardy, Intrepid Alpha 2+ take 30 seconds to start boot sequence on MacBook / Pro

[mon]

Hi

I have installed ubuntu on a macbook core 2 duo and it takes ages to boot. I've read this is related to the fact that the guid partition is deleted and apple's bios take a long time to realize it's the mbr where the bootloade is (grub). I've read here this could be solved with elilo:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=386545

I don't know if this could be fixed with grub2, but at least I wanted to know if there's a fix for this in grub.

thanks

[mon (javiermon-deactivatedaccount)]

This has another annoyance, when there's a cd inserted in the laptop, apple's efi will boot it since it seems to find it before the mbr. And since the core 2 duo macbook has a bug in grub which sometimes the keyboard is not recognized, you have to do a full boot in the live cd to then reboot. I know it's a strange use case but it has already happened to me :(

thanks

[mon (javiermon-deactivatedaccount)]

A posible solution I've just thought (and it may be just plain wrong) could be to suggest to create an efi GUID partition table and install either elilo or grub-efi.

thanks

[mon (javiermon-deactivatedaccount)]

I've assigned to ubiquity since it's the program that set's grub and the partition scheme on install, but I assume it's not really a ubiquity bug.

[mon (javiermon-deactivatedaccount)]

Does the macbook need to boot in bios-compatible mode? Because if not, maybe ubiquity could set-up an gpt partition with elilo/grub-efi to avoid this problem.

thanks

[Christer Edwards (christer.edwards)]

The only way I've found to bypass this is to install rEFIt which adds that at the boot prior to grub.. but I'm not sure if its possible to install that outside of OSX.

[mon (javiermon-deactivatedaccount)]

Someone in the forums provides another workaround http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5166788&postcount=21
but it needs the bless utility from osx.

[oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad)]

AFAIK you need MacOSX to install rEFIt.

[oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad)]

I confirm this bug for Ubuntu 8.04.1 and for 8.10 Alpha 2 (fully updated) (both 64-Bit), testing on a MacBook Pro rev. 3. Why doesn't Ubuntu offer to install elilo instead of grub?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Last I checked, we couldn't use ELILO and boot in native EFI mode because the kernel wouldn't actually work (e.g. you wouldn't get a working framebuffer). Feel free to demonstrate that I'm wrong with current kernels! Until then, I'm going to play it safe.

[oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad)]

I have five questions:

1. Would the use of ELILO fully solve this problem?
2. Why doesn't the Ubuntu installation routine offer the use of ELILO?
3. I read somewhere that the main problem is that the notebook's EFI looks for a HFS partition first. Could HFS partitioning be implemented as an option during the update process?
4. Why is there hardly any progress on the various MacBook Pro related issues in launchpad?
5. Why can't you install rEFIt on all Mac Book Pros?

[bdkoepke (bdkoepke)]

I can confirm that grub-efi from svn will load a 2.6.26 kernel on a macbook pro 3,1. (The one with the nvidia graphics card). I did not have to add any custom options, and the graphics card works with accelerated graphics. (Same xorg.conf loads fine). There are two problems, however. The first is that the framebuffer does not work. It does load and print text; however, it is as though it thinks the screen size is 800x640 and attempts to "stretch" the screen. What results is an unusable framebuffer. Combinations of different options with both vesafb, efifb, and uvesafb makes no difference. (Correct me if I'm wrong). The second is that EFI does not map the graphics card memory the same as with bios. Therefore some of the registers are missing that are required for pommed to work. Basically this means that I have no backlight control. Everything else with pommed works. I have not tried the intrepid beta, which apparently has a HAL implementation of the backlight control; however, I fear that it uses the same codebase as pommed.

oss_test_launchpad

My macbook pro boots to the desktop in 30 seconds; however, I have no indication about the boot sequence with EFI.
The reason that the macbook pro bugs take so long to get looked after is because they are usually not fixed upstream. If upstream is going to fix the bugs in the future, then why waste the time here? Adding ELILO to the installation process would also greatly increase the complexity of ubiquity, and this would generate quite a few more bugs. Since the generic installer works already on macbooks why would they bother until EFI support is more solid. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad)]

Well, maybe because unless ELILO is being offered, no one can test it and report bugs.

[Slick (slick666)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately, we cannot work on this bug because your description didn't include enough information. You may find it helpful to read "How to report bugs effectively" http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. We'd be grateful if you would then provide a more complete description of the problem.

We have instructions on debugging some types of problems at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProcedures

At a minimum, we need:
1. the specific steps or actions you took that caused you to encounter the problem,
2. the behavior you expected, and
3. the behavior you actually encountered (in as much detail as possible).
Thanks!

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]