Installing Debian on a MacBook Pro Without rEFInd or Virtual Machines

by The Skog

While recovering from surgery this week, I decided to dedicate my time at home to playing around with Linux.  I usually perform this in VMware Fusion on an older MacIntel, but I hated the choppiness, lack of video support, and my trackpad leaving the virtual machine while in full-screen mode (don't get me started on VMware Tools!).

So, for all you secret Mac lovers who miss Linux in a non-virtual environment, I'll walk you through how to install Debian on a MacBook Pro without the assistance of any Mac partitions or rEFInd.

You have to understand that, according to Apple, all modern Macs will not boot OS X to a volume that's not Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or Case-Sensitive formatted, so I decided to try a tool called rEFInd.  This tool is a fork of rEFIt, a third-party boot manager that allows you to pick from media that is not supported by Apple's EFI bootloader as a bootable device.  While very easy to install, don't let this tool fool you; the way it's able to work is through a directory, labeled EFI, that's installed to the root partition of Macintosh HD.

Basically, if Mac OS becomes corrupted beyond repair and you have to reinstall Mac OS, your rEFInd partitions will no longer work.

After playing with a few different distros, I finally settled on Debian because stability is my main concern; that's why I bought a Mac four years ago in the first place.  After installing rEFInd, I wrote my Debian Wheezy ISO to a USB stick via UNetbootin for Mac.

When it completed, I was presented with a message that said "The created USB device will not boot off a Mac.  Insert it into a PC, and select the USB boot option in the BIOS menu" since it was DOS-partitioned and FAT32-formatted.

Ignoring the message, I rebooted my Mac and attempted an Option boot, since I couldn't remember if rEFInd gave options automatically.  When doing this, instead of rEFInd popping up, Apple's EFI bootloader recognized the USB stick labeled as EFI Boot.  Selecting this option took me to the GNU GRUB loader for the Debian Wheezy netinstall.  At this point, I had bypassed rEFInd altogether and decided to perform a Debian installation that used the entire hard drive, blowing away any and all existing partitions (including the Recovery partition).  Upon reboot after a successful installation, I got the Apple chime and, immediately, the Mac booted to GNU GRUB on the hard disk.

Next thing you know, I'm at Debian's GNOME 3 desktop, excited that it had no reliance on OS X or rEFInd, and all my modifier keys, like volume, display, and keyboard brightness all work out of the box.

To conclude, I figured out from inspecting the partitions that the hard disk was using the GPT partition scheme, and Mac OS only works with GPT.  Therefore, that was my assumption as to why it worked.  I couldn't find documentation on how to do this, but the fact that I'm writing this on the Debian machine spoken about in this article is proof enough for me.

As a result, I'll be keeping this Mac for much longer than expected, and you could keep yours too.

Enjoy!