[Bug 1369187] Re: Installation on Macs could use EFI booting instead of legacy BIOS

[Jason Heeris]

I went through the Debian package submission/mentor process years ago
(for RabbitVCS) and would rather not repeat the experience.

I'm happy to keep my packages' metadata up to date with the latest
Debian standards, and happy to support what I publish (on
Github/PPAs/etc.), and happy to take back changes from Debian
maintainers, but I have no desire to subject myself to Debian's package
submission purgatory again.

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Title:
  Installation on Macs could use EFI booting instead of legacy BIOS

Status in debian-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (Trusty) on my Mac Mini 6,1
  using the server installer. First I tried the "+mac" variant, which
  gave me a system that booted in legacy BIOS mode, and then then I
  tried the normal variant, which gave me an unbootable system.

  I eventually got the EFI installation working, resulting in an Ubuntu
  installation that boots directly from the Mac bootloader firmware (ie.
  no rEFInd/rEFIt). The basic steps are to use an HFS+ filesystem
  instead of VFAT for the EFI partition, to "bless" the EFI boot image,
  and to create a couple of files that the Mac bootloader requires.

  I wrote the full procedure up as a guide:

  http://heeris.id.au/2014/ubuntu-plus-mac-pure-efi-boot/

  While my guide only covers single-boot into Ubuntu on a Mac Mini, I
  hope there's enough detail there to illustrate what's needed for a
  more general case.

  Note that grub-efi-amd64 already does the right thing (except for
  Debian bug #716927 [1]). The only tool that isn't already in the repos
  is the mactel-boot utility (aka. hfsbless), which I've made available
  in my PPA[2] (see also the Github repo[3], which has the Ubuntu
  packaging metadata in various branches, and is git-buildpackage
  friendly).

  So it should be possible to install Ubuntu in EFI mode on Macs. This
  would reduce the options presented to a user when downloading the
  installer, and result in a more consistent experience for users across
  Windows and Mac.

  [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=716927#20
  [2] https://launchpad.net/~detly/+archive/ubuntu/mactel-utils
  [3] https://github.com/detly/mactel-boot

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