Installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro 2,1 with EFI-32

[Jack Howarth]

Using a rather round about approach I managed to get Ubuntu 16.10
installed on my MacBook Pro 2,1 which unfortunately only has EFI-32
firmware. I had to resort to starting from the Debian Jessie
multi-arch installer though as neither of Ubuntu's current Live
installers support doing a mixed mode install as described in
https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI as

Support for mixed-mode systems: 64-bit system with 32-bit UEFI

Some systems have been released containing 64-bit Intel Atom CPUs
(such as the Bay Trail), but unfortunately use 32-bit UEFI firmware
with no BIOS compatibility mode. Using the 32-bit UEFI x86 support, an
i386 installation should be possible on these machines but it won't
make the most of the 64-bit hardware.

Debian Jessie (8.0) was the first Linux distribution to include full
support for mixed-mode UEFI installation on these machines. The
multi-arch installation media (available in netinst and DVD form)
include the UEFI boot loaders necessary for both i386 and amd64 boot.
By selecting "64-bit install" from the initial boot menu,
debian-installer will install a 64-bit (amd64) version of Debian. The
system will automatically detect that the underlying UEFI firmware is
32-bit and will install the appropriate version of grub-efi to work
with it.

Ubuntu needs to adopt this approach for their next release's
installers. The current ubuntu-16.10-desktop-amd64.iso fails on a
MacBook Pro 2,1 due to its requirement for EFI-64 in order to boot
from a USB drive or key. The ubuntu-16.10-desktop-i386.iso fails as
well but apparently because it doesn't use UEFI to boot but some sort
of loop back mode.

After installing Debian Jessie with only the core install and its
System Tools, I swapped out the /etc/apt/sources.list for a copy from
Ubuntu 16.10 and completed the installation in apt-get with that. The
last remaining step to make the MacBook Pro bootable under the Mac EFI
involved making sure that the boot partition placed at the /boot mount
point by the Debian Jessie installer had a fake mach_kernel file and a
file for System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist containing...

<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
    <string></string>
    <key>ProductName</key>
    <string>Linux</string>
    <key>ProductVersion</key>
    <string>Arch Linux</string>
</dict>
</plist>

at the /boot/efi directory level. Note that while this approach makes
the resulting Ubuntu 16.10 installation bootable on the MacBook Pro's
EFI-32 firmware that the option boot selector on the machine won't
show the volume.
                    Jack