Re: Goal: Natively run ChromiumOS on MacPro tower

[Liam McLoughlin]

What's unique about that image is that it's actually an MBR-based image. Booting Mac hardware in EFI mode to Linux has proved problematic in my experience, I know it can be done (Ubuntu works on a bunch of them for example), but it's bit tricky.

By building an MBR image, you can boot in the machine's BIOS compatibility mode (I forget the real name, but it's the same mode used to boot Windows). This results in a significantly slower boot, but removes the headache of dealing with EFI and let's you boot an otherwise unmodified image.

As for getting a more modern image running, you'd have to cook an image with the relevant drivers, copy out the first and third partitions and then rebuild them into an MBR disk. Alternatively, you could look into fixing the core issue with EFI boot on some of these Mac machines.

On Monday, November 26, 2012 5:53:16 AM UTC, Jeff Seelig wrote:

I got it working! Running natively and super excited about it! I've been thinking about this and fooling with it for about a month, so it feels great to have it running.

I was correct in realizing that my problem was getting Hexxeh's macbookair image onto my SSD in order to boot.

I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 on a windows PC to copy the contents and partitions of the USB drive (made with Hexxeh's image creator) over to my SSD. Once that was done, I re-installed the SSD into my mac tower and tried to boot. 

I still have rEFIt-0.14 installed, so it recognized the SSD as having linux installed and asked me if I wanted to boot. I selected the SSD and booted with success.

Hexxeh's ChromiumOS macbook air image runs well. I have support for Ethernet, USB audio, flash, and more. It plays youtube videos and recognizes my 1TB OS X drive as removable content. I can open picture files, but video files and documents seem to have no support (licensing issues, I'm sure). Additionally, the num pad on my desktop keyboard is not recognized.

I will post a how-to guide on this soon if anyone is interested and my long term goals are:

1) determine what is unique about Hexxeh's macbookair image vs. vanilla

2) determine a way to get a newer version of Chromium running (this is only version 14)

3) determine a way to get support for video files (AVI, MPEG, WMV, MKV, etc)

4) determine the feasibility of porting linux software raid support into chromium and learn how to do it myself of bribe someone much more intelligent to do so.

5) check to see if Chromium is able to take advantage of all hardware that is present (two dual-core CPUs, graphics, wifi, etc)

** posted from ChromiumOS running natively on an Intel Mac Pro tower **

On Sunday, November 25, 2012 6:12:28 PM UTC-8, Jeff Seelig wrote:

After reinstalling rEFIt-0.14, I was able to get it to recognize my usb thumb drive. I tried to boot from the hexxeh vanilla image on my usb drive, but it gave an error and said OSX does not place nicely when trying to boot from USB. 

It appears that getting a bootable image on the SSD is my only option and that brings me back to Hexxeh's macbookair posting. These commands do not work on my tower. I dont know if that is because I am using an OSX DVD, or because the disk names are different.

8) Once the install wizard appears, click Utilities on the bar at the top, and then Terminal

9) Type the following command without quotes: “umount /dev/disk*”

10) Type the following command without quotes: “dd if=/dev/rdisk1 of=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4m count=512″

11) Type the following command without quotes: “bless –device /dev/disk0s2 –setBoot –legacy”

[Jamie Murphy]

Did you ever get further on this or have you stopped using it?

Did you run the vanilla builds now?

[Tyler Loch]

I've been attempting this with the latest Chromium build from Hexxeh (at http://download-chromiumos.appspot.com/) on a MacBook's local drive, but have had no luck.

Correct me if I'm wrong... From what I'm reading from both Jeff and Hexxeh (Liam), I've done the following:

dd the 1st and 3rd partition from the USB image to partitions an MBR drive. (which would now make them partitions 1 and 2).

I've edited the partition table to give both partitions on the local drive a Linux ID (83), and have flagged the first as bootable.

rEFIt does not recognize the partitions as bootable (no selectable icons), and setting a manual bless command results in a "missing operating system", or even just a blinking cursor, at the next boot.

I've also tried the above with a GUID partition table.

Am I missing something trivial?

On Thursday, May 16, 2013 1:52:48 AM UTC-5, Jeff Seelig wrote:

I did get it working and I dual boot it.

The trick is to use refit for mac, then use a standard image in the special partition map needed for a mac. Chromium OS runs very quickly and recognizes both processors from what I understand. It also recognized the three other hard drives present as removable storage.

The only reason this has not become my main OS is because Chromium lacks all of the great features present in ChromeOS on a real chromebook. No plugins, licenses, google services, etc

http://refit.sourceforge.net/  (dont install this if you're already dualbooting on the tower)

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[Huw]

I've been using the Mavericks bootloader, which finally supports EFI boots, and I can get arnoldthebat's image to boot properly, except once it's done showing the Chromium logo it shuts down again. I'm currently trying his x86 image, and then I'll move onto Hexxeh's new appspot builds. What I'm most annoyed about is that when Hexxeh revamped his blog it broke all of his old posts, and the original MBA image, so we're stuck with reworking this ourselves.

[Tyler Loch]

I've had great success lately with booting Chromium OS (and even Chrome OS) on early Mac minis, iMacs, and MacBooks (albiet with an external mouse).

Recipe:

MBR disk, three partitions.

USB Partition 1 -> HD Partition 1

USB Partition 3 -> HD Partition 2

USB Partition 12 -> HD Partition 13

Using fdisk, fix the partition IDs.

HD1: 83

HD2: 83

HD3: 04

Flag HD Partition 3 as bootable.

Mount Partition 3, delete the .efi boot files, and change syslinux/root.A.cfg's root drive reference to "/dev/sda2".

Change syslinux/default.cfg to "DEFAULT chromeos-hd.A"

Occasionally, the Mac wouldn't boot to Chromium OS right away after this. Booting using rEFIt on a USB stick once seemed to coax it into working order from that point forward. (Don't know if this is important or just superstition....)

I've tested GMA950-era Macs (2006 to mid 2007ish) and they work great with everything but touchpad and Ethernet drivers on Hexxeh and ArnoldTheBat's 32bit images.