EFI your beauty is a Dilemma

I believed, most people will agree that EFI is beautiful, sexy, and sophisticated. Is EFI an artist (?), No she is NOT, is EFI a supermodel (?) No she is NOT. EFI is a breaker, EFI is milestone in mid 1990's and not so popular, but EFI brought many people into New Horizon, new hope, new (un)-limitation when she was born. EFI found fixed home in 2005 and someone taking good care of her.

During the last couple weeks, I have spent a lot of time with EFI. I believed I do like EFI especially for FUN. If you wish to introduce to efi just visit one of EFI Page.

As I got "used" MacBook 2.1 with Intel 945 VGA Card and Atheros AR5005G wifi-adapter, and I wish only Single Boot Linux Distro I have to read a lot of web page to learn and choose the best linux distro for this nice box.

A Disaster
Most of Web Pages suggested to do dual boot for most EFI system especially for MacBook by Apple on running LINUX, since the firmware only can be able to be updated by Great OSX. OSX Is great, No wonder. I think OSX is best implementation on UNIX GUI. But I do like LINUX, Just a feeling that LINUX is FIT to support my daily jobs, for fun and pleasure.

I just can't help my feeling to have linux single boot on the MacBook 2.1. Fisrt try is my favourite linux distro UBUNTU. Lucid Lynx either i386 or amd64 running well on the box, but I doubt with the HAL since Lucid is proposed to be Hal Free, but the isight-firmware-tools required HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to make iSight work. Installing single boot ubuntu on MacBook 2.1 is not pain, just like installing on other machine, however the problem will Not same :=))

The most disaster for single boot ubuntu on the box is LONG DELAY during booting between the point of time pressing on power key up to grub interface (I did not use Lilo anymore). But how Long (?) in my machine about 40-43 seconds :=)) many people reported in the net between 20 - 40 seconds. Is 40 seconds long time (?) comparing to a day is 24 hours or equivalent to 86,400 seconds. Waiting 40 seconds is actually nothing. But many linux users will not happy to wait 40 seconds for booting the machine.

What is next disaster for EFI on MacBook 2.1 (?) Apple Locked the EFI only allow to run on 32bits mode. My ubuntu amd64 (Intrepid and Lucid) run well but the kernel detect 3.01 GB only RAM even physically the RAM is 2x2 GB = 4GB installed.

Nowadays, Apple released Snow Leopard, the first Operating System with 64bits Capable. But if you have efi-32 there will no chance to boot 64 bit kernel Just for your READING. Since I'm not a geek and have no sufficient technical knowledge to explain, I just guessing, even Linux amd64 is installed on the MacBook 2.1 but the efi.32 limited many thinks. Ubuntu Amd-64 by default is Multi-Lib, therefore still can run smoothly. I have to test with Gentoo amd64 which can be set-up on Non-Multilib environment.


Solution
The only solution I have tried for eliminating "Long Delay" booting on single boot ubuntu for MacBook 2.1 is rEFIT. The best set-up for rEFIT is on Mac OSX :=)) . What is Mean (?) You CAN NOT away OSX for your MacBook. Sure you can install OSX, Install rEFIT, install Linux and wipe OSX Partition, thus you have only Linux single boot with rEFIT. In fact we always need "assistance" of OSX to have good set-up of MacBook. Is this a barrier (?). I believed apple designed this machine with all barrier (For Linux) include.

From Linux on MacBook 2.1

This blog post is INTERESTING

Linux Distro
What is the BEST Linux Distro for MacBook (2.1) I will put on post later ...

.... have nice linuxing