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Comment by digitailor | Hacker News Reader

Yes you're right, except I wasn't able to get a Debian install image to burn to a thumb drive the Mac would recognize. That's why I had to use Mint. Unfortunately, for this particular MBP there are no nvidia drivers that work well or at all in Mint, so I went the masochistic #! install route. I'm glad I did though.

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First this:

> Debian still has no install for UEFI.

Then this:

> I wasn't able to get a Debian install image to burn to a thumb drive the Mac would recognize

Blaming Debian for the locked down nature of Macs and the general shortcomings of Apple-computers for hacking-purposes seems a bit far-fetched.

Get a laptop not made by patent-trolls, and you may expect better Debian-support.

Something got lost in translation- I use Debian exclusively as my Linux distro, and Crunchbang is a thin veneer over it. It was a lot of effort to get it going on that MacBook and worth every hour. The distro has zero responsibility to support Mac hardware, but they were close, and the last mile was my job. That's entirely reasonable.

Do you know how happy I was to figure out how to get the Apple bootloader off of the machine? Joyous! I was proud ;)

I don't think he is blaming Debian in any way.

It's about Ubuntu, but using this I was able to create a bootable USB drive with rEFIt, and then booting a FreeBSD live CD image on another stick for installing.

http://www.michaelevans.org/blog/2013/01/15/boot-ubuntu-from...

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