Hi! This is my first post and my first entry into the world of Linux. So as you can tell, my experience is pretty much zero. Regardless of this, I decided to go and give openSUSE a try, after hearing good things about it (and because I'm tired of OS X)
I've stumbled upon quite a bit of hassles concerning my Macbook Pro 3,1 (mid 2007 15-inch model) concerning EFI/BIOS problems when trying to boot Live-CD's (a "select CD-Rom boot type" prompt because the firmware is EFI 1.1 which doesn't support modern UEFI installers or something in that direction)
But after trying out Ubuntu and Linux Mint, the installer of OpenSUSE seemed to work!
However, for some reason, the installer could only run in text mode. I'm familiar with DOS-looking installers from Windows, so that wasn't a problem. The screen flickered an awful lot though, probably because of my video card not being recognized properly (had the same with Ubuntu btw)
Everything seemed to work fine, it installed three partitions after the first two already present (built in EFI/ESP and HFS+), I used 4Gb for SWAP on sda3, /root on sda4 and a /home partition on sda5
After a reboot, the GRUB openSUSE interface launched (no more text mode!) and I selected to boot openSUSE normally. Withouth success. It returned with the following error:
[ 1.792913] i8042: No controller found
After shutting down by pressing the power button and rebooting, I decided to try the advanced options and selected the boot openSUSE in compatibility mode
Which worked! But performance is really slow, and I thought having to boot in compatibility mode all the time is not normal. The keyboard function keys didn't work either and I noticed my laptop becoming quite hot after some looking around at the gorgeous GNOME interface.
So there's my problem: the no controller found error, and compatibility mode resulting in slow performance (which I guess is normal?)
My only lead is the following article: http://www.rodsbooks.com/ubuntu-efi/index.html
I think the installer managed to install openSUSE in EFI mode, as it uses GRUB2 and the MBR partition table in rEFInd's Hybrid MBR tool shows only the protective MBR (of type 'ee'). The article on rodsbooks about EFI booting on macs mentions graphic card and other hardware issues when using EFI on older Mac models.
I guess the solution would be to install openSUSE using the legacy BIOS boot mode of my mac, but I don't know how to make the installation CD boot into BIOS mode instead of EFI, any help would be highly appreciated! Also, any information regarding installation on Macbooks would be great (I'm a little worried about fan control and other drivers, is this even supported in openSUSE?)
I hope my post wasn't too long :)
All the best,
Ben
p.s. hardware:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
GPU: GeForce 8600M GT (1440x900 resolution)
I've stumbled upon quite a bit of hassles concerning my Macbook Pro 3,1 (mid 2007 15-inch model) concerning EFI/BIOS problems when trying to boot Live-CD's (a "select CD-Rom boot type" prompt because the firmware is EFI 1.1 which doesn't support modern UEFI installers or something in that direction)
But after trying out Ubuntu and Linux Mint, the installer of OpenSUSE seemed to work!
However, for some reason, the installer could only run in text mode. I'm familiar with DOS-looking installers from Windows, so that wasn't a problem. The screen flickered an awful lot though, probably because of my video card not being recognized properly (had the same with Ubuntu btw)
Everything seemed to work fine, it installed three partitions after the first two already present (built in EFI/ESP and HFS+), I used 4Gb for SWAP on sda3, /root on sda4 and a /home partition on sda5
After a reboot, the GRUB openSUSE interface launched (no more text mode!) and I selected to boot openSUSE normally. Withouth success. It returned with the following error:
[ 1.792913] i8042: No controller found
After shutting down by pressing the power button and rebooting, I decided to try the advanced options and selected the boot openSUSE in compatibility mode
Which worked! But performance is really slow, and I thought having to boot in compatibility mode all the time is not normal. The keyboard function keys didn't work either and I noticed my laptop becoming quite hot after some looking around at the gorgeous GNOME interface.
So there's my problem: the no controller found error, and compatibility mode resulting in slow performance (which I guess is normal?)
My only lead is the following article: http://www.rodsbooks.com/ubuntu-efi/index.html
I think the installer managed to install openSUSE in EFI mode, as it uses GRUB2 and the MBR partition table in rEFInd's Hybrid MBR tool shows only the protective MBR (of type 'ee'). The article on rodsbooks about EFI booting on macs mentions graphic card and other hardware issues when using EFI on older Mac models.
I guess the solution would be to install openSUSE using the legacy BIOS boot mode of my mac, but I don't know how to make the installation CD boot into BIOS mode instead of EFI, any help would be highly appreciated! Also, any information regarding installation on Macbooks would be great (I'm a little worried about fan control and other drivers, is this even supported in openSUSE?)
I hope my post wasn't too long :)
All the best,
Ben
p.s. hardware:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
GPU: GeForce 8600M GT (1440x900 resolution)