Skip to content

Tool allowing you to put a Linux distro on a USB drive and make it bootable on Intel Macs using EFI.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

radix1980/Mac-Linux-USB-Loader

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

20 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

This is the Mac Linux USB Loader, a tool allowing you to take an ISO of a Linux distribution and make it boot using EFI. It requires a single USB drive formatted as FAT with at least 2 GB free recommended.

The tool is necessary to make certain Linux distributions boot that do not have EFI booting support. Many distributions are adding this with the release of Windows 8, but it has not been finalized and is still nonstandard by most distros. 

If you wish to contribute to the code or fork the repository, please do so. The application is currently in beta with major functionality chunks missing and once I reach beta I will need everyone's help to make it a great tool, hopefully along the popularity lines of unetbootin or similar tools.

I created this tool, if you care, for several reasons:

1) None of the other tools available (esp. unetbootin) feel native and operate as you would expect on the Mac platform.
2) None of the other methods of which I am aware have the ability to make the archives boot on Intel Macs.
3) It was personally a pain in the neck getting Linux distros to boot via USB on Macs.

That being said, it does have a few shortcomings:

1) Linux fails to have graphics on some Macs (i.e Macbook Pros with nVidia graphics), which in some cases prevents boot, but this is not necessarily an issue with Mac Linux USB Loader as much as it is an issue with the video drivers that ship with most distros.
2) It only detects up to 10 USB ports. I chose 10 because it is unlikely someone will have more ports than that. If they do, then maybe I'll do something about it, but the only computer I've even seen that had more than a few ports was a desktop PC with six, but given that PCs do not run OS X that would not really limit us anyway.

About

Tool allowing you to put a Linux distro on a USB drive and make it bootable on Intel Macs using EFI.

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published