Installing Zorin 18 on an EFI32 MacBook 2,1

Installing Zorin OS
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The MacBook 2,1 is a special beast. It sports a 64bit CPU but has a 32bit EFi that needs special treatment.

I managed to install Linux Mint on it, but have a hard time to get Zorin running.
I tried lots of approaches and saw different related topic on here like:

It seems that the only ways to go are:

  • installing rEFInd (but some sources say this is not reliable with Linux on the MacBook)
  • installing with MBR and then somehow add 32 bit EFI Support (i tried this too)
  • installing some os like Linux Mint that still supports EFI32 and then hope that Zorin does not touch the boot loader when installing alongside Linux Mint (did not try yet)

Managed to create a bootable Zorin 18 Installer. But even with MBR partition, I found no way to create a bootable installation on SSD. I tried re-starting to the live ISO and check, it seems to be correctly installed on the SSD, but there's still an EFI Partition.

I wonder what the correct partition layout in an MBR partition is and what to select in the installer to get a bootable installation. I also tried the Zorin 17 installer from the dedicated page here but it seems to have no EFI 32 Support when installed, too Linux DVD images (and how-to) for 32-bit EFI Macs (late 2006 models) | mattgadient.com

Anyone has some clues? Did anybody successfully manage to get Zorin running on these machines (some iMacs and Mac Pro seem to have the same conditions to t)?

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https://askubuntu.com/questions/1390339/installing-ubuntu-20-04-on-macbook-2-1-2007 Try this?

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From the linked article

Yes, the MacBook 2007 can only read from a 32 bit EFI booting partition. The Ubuntu 20.04 installer iso uses a 64 bit EFI booting partition. But you can add the 32 bit EFI to the installer and make it think it includes it. This way you can make it install Ubuntu amd64 properly.

Do the following:

Flash the Ubuntu USB installer on a USB. I used Rufus for that on a Windows 10 PC.
Copy content of this repository into the root of the installer USB: https://github.com/faalbers/EFI_32_BIT
Don't install Ubuntu but first try it on the USB so we can install an additional package missing first.
Once in the "Try Ubuntu" interface, start a terminal and run the following commands to install grub 32 bit package so that the installation will be successful at the end. You need an internet connection to find the package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-efi-ia32

Now install Ubuntu and it will work.

Hope this works for you too.

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Thanks for this approach! I'm still hesitant to try something on my running LMDE 7 distro now on the machine, but once I have a Backup of the SSD, I'll run this as another try.

Interesting approach to put this on the USB! I currently run the ISOs directly from a ventoy USB stick, so I'd need to figure out whether cloning the repo GitHub - faalbers/EFI_32_BIT somewhere there might work, too (especially if the repo is not in the root then).

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