Esfuerzos para esquivar EFI

QI have a Mac Mini from 2006 which no longer receives updates from Apple. I hope to make this machine great again by installing Linux, but I’ve not made much progress.

I’ve tried to boot several of your DVDs on this, but the machine just gets stuck, with a message saying “Select CD-ROM Boot Type”. I understand that there are some issues booting Linux due to these machines’ 32-bit EFI, but I can’t think of an easy solution. Any ideas? Pedro Perez, Puebla State, Mexico

AIs that you Effy? There were two Mac Minis that came out in 2006, and you’re right, both have a 32-bit EFI. However, the newest firmware enables them to boot in BIOS compatibility mode, which is also needed for accelerated video in Linux, so updating firmware is your first task.

Sadly, even this won’t make it possible for you to boot the multicatalog images that most 64-bit Linux distros (and our DVDs) use. The early 2006 Minis had 32-bit Intel Core Duo CPUs, and the late ones packed 64-bit Core 2 Duos. If yours is the early 2006 model, then your only solution is to boot a 32-bit distro. For the later edition, you can re-engineer a standard 64-bit distro, ISO stripping out the UEFI booting support. Essentially you just mount the ISO, and remaster it with xorriso using just the boot code from the syslinux package (see for example the section on Removing UEFI boot support at https:// wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_ Extensible_Firmware_Interface). You’ll likely want to install the rEFInd boot manager if you’re dual booting, and there may yet be other obstacles to surmount. Good luck!