[manjaro-dev] mac support?

[kendell clark]

hi
I need to apologize for that rant like response. Basically, what I want 
to know is how to make mac users lives a little easier. I don't own an 
apple, but I've never had a machine give me so much trouble. The way 
I've been tought to burn images onto flash drives works on every other 
machine, except macs. Even machines with secure boot use the shim loader 
to get around it. But macs simply refuse to boot the images. Even more 
complicated is the fact that not all macs do it. The only mac I have 
occasional access to, my mom's, boots sonar, manjaro and fedora with 
zero problems. But I've seen others who simply, will, not, boot it. I go 
around and around in circles for a while, the mac user gets frustrated 
and starts saying things like "apple just works, why would I want to use 
this piece of sh**", I get frustrated and start saying things like, "I 
can't understand it. This is supposed to work, why isn't it working." 
Occasionally I'll get them to use something like fedora which can 
somehow get around this, but usually they give up, go back to the mac, 
and start spouting anti linux stuff again. Very discouraging. Isn't 
there anything we can do? Since I'm part of the manjaro community, I'd 
like to do something that benefits both manjaro and sonar, not just one 
or the other. I've seen a command on my system called "grub-mac-bless" 
which is supposed to help, but I don't have a clue what it does, other 
than "blessing" the image, whatever that means. If I haven't put people 
off, any thoughts? I've been trying to help several mac users for two 
days and it's not going well.
Thanks
Kendell clark


On 11/4/2015 9:01 PM, kendell clark wrote:
> hi
> I'm not convinced this is true. Linux's hardware support is as good as
> it is on anyo ther computer. But we can't simply go, well it sucks, so
> we'll just sit back. This is going to get even more important as more
> and more computers have secure boot turned on. I hate the spec
> personally, but ms is going to do everythingv it can to make sure people
> use it, and so from the factory they're going to ship with it turned on.
> And unless linux can handle it with little issues that's yet one more
> thing we have to put up with when users complain, and I for one have
> little enough tolerance for that as it is. There has got to be something
> we can do to make this usable, without making lives hell for the
> developers who have to keep all this stuff working.
> Thanks
> Kendell clark
>
>
> On 11/04/2015 04:48 AM, kendell clark wrote:
>> hi all
>> I've been having lots of prospective sonar and manjaro users wanting to
>> switch over, or at least to try linux, only to run into a problem. Their
>> mac refuses to boot sonar. The problem seems to be that the mac is
>> checking for something in our images and, not finding it, reports an
>> error of "checksum mismatch" and won't boot They've verified that the
>> sha512 sums do indeed match, so that's not it.  I've been looking all
>> around the web and haven't really found much relevant. I thought we
>> could do something similar to what fedora images do. That is, they
>> create an hfsplus partition at the end of the iso with a fake mock
>> kernel that points to grub, making the mac think it's booting OSX. I
>> don't know the exact details of how this works yet I've contacted the
>> fedora mailing list. Would anyone be interested in building this into
>> the build scripts at some point? I do not own a mac, so know little
>> about them. I do know that I've rarely had a more difficult machine than
>> some of these people's mac. The more and more things I come up for them
>> to try, the more and more frustrated they get until that inevitable,
>> linux sucks, moment. Any thoughts?
>> Thanks
>> Kendell clark
>>