multi boot - Installing linux onto late 2008 Macbook Pro and getting corrupted screen

This is a somewhat general issue that I've been running into while trying to install Linux onto my late 2008 Macbook Pro.

I've tried the following distros:

• Linux Mint 10


• Linux Mint 14


• Ubuntu 12.10


• Fedora 17

What's happening is that at some point during the boot process, something the Macbook Pro doesn't like is crashing it. I think it is related to the gpu drivers, but I can't tell for sure. What happens is the system totally freezes and the top one-third of the screen is all corrupted.

I tried changing the runlevel to 3 so that X does not start while I was attempting to boot Fedora 17's live install, but a few seconds after getting the initial login prompt, it went all corrupted. Up to that point however, everything was fine.

It also does not seem to make a difference if I run the "windows" boot loader (which is a low-res shell) or the EFI boot loader (which is a high-res shell). Both exhibit the same behavior.

I did somehow manage to get Linux Mint to boot to a desktop on ONE occasion, however it froze shortly afterwards.

FWIW, Mac OS X 10.6 works perfectly fine on this machine. I also tried installing rEFIt, but that did not help at all.

Answer

I believe I figured out the cause of the issue.

It was indeed an incompatibility with the way the Apple hardware communicated with the VESA drivers, I believe when switching modes on the built-in screen. When nomodeset was added to the kernel parameters, system could proceed to boot without crashing.

The Macbook Pro is Late 2008, 5,1 with nVIDIA 9600m GT.

nomodeset is only necessary until you can install the proprietary nVIDIA drivers for your distro.

To recap:

• Installed rEFIt while in OS X (run /efi/refit/enable.sh if rEFIt does not work automatically)


• I ran the Mint 14 live DVD by adding nomodeset to the kernel parameters in the grub bootloader.


• Ran Mint installer


• Did partitioning
  
  
  
  • mounted / to /dev/sda4, also installed grub to this partition
  
  
  • swap on /dev/sda3 (because I placed some space in-between the Mac partition)
  
  


• Finished mint installer, rebooted.


• Booted from linux partition using rEFIt.


• Again, added nomodeset to kernel parameters so I could boot.


• Ran Software Sources application
  
  
  
  • Went to Additional Drivers tab
  
  
  • Selected first NVIDIA driver (proprietary, tested), applied changes
  
  
  • Waited for it to finish, then rebooted.
  
  


• Booted into linux again and all was well (nomodeset automatically removed as it is a temporary change)

Phew.