Rubén, Apple Intel Macs can indeed boot from USB drive with the "bless" command, see for example:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019920.html http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005882.html A possible scenario I unfortunately haven't been able to test is to create a sh script containing the bless command and named with the ".command" filename extension, which makes it an icon-clickable executable script in the OSX interface. Sean 2009/10/21 Rubén Rodríguez Pérez <ru...@gnu.org>: > >> 1). Live CD boots and runs fine on a MacBook Pro (though has no >> wireless network, or camera support, and screen redraw was a little >> slow in some activities so I guess no or little use of gfx hardware >> acceleration). > > Trisquel is fully free, so we lack of several hardware drivers (no > nvidia 3d support, several wifi cards do not work, etc). > >> 2). Using the Live CD to install trisquel-sugar to a USB stick (my >> main test goal). WARNING DATA LOSS: Targeting a USB stick for the >> install process worked smoothly, but right at the very end I spotted >> it saying "installing grub to hd0". This renders the primary >> internal hard disk on a Mac un-bootable. After much >> experimentation***, the only safe solution was a fresh re-patrition >> of the drive, and to perform a full restore from a back-up (thank >> goodness for Apple's Time Machine). > > But you should not create a usb installation that way! A proper > usb-creator is bundled in the iso, you can launch it using the > terminal (a graphical launcher is on the go). The usb-creator utility > builds a persistent live-usb drive, which will also run much > faster than the installed-to-usb-disk method, and with no risk. > > You can read more about it in the wiki entry: > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast > >> *** PRAM resets, Disk Utility volume recovery, re-setting start-up >> disk, blessing from command line, re-install of OS, couple of other >> 3rd party recovery tools.... [trim] > > I'm happy to see you managed to recover it :) > >> 3). The resulting USB Stick failed to boot on a MacBook (but might >> work on other hardware, need to test). > > The apple bios cannot boot a usb drive, but you can use the live CD as > a boot helper, you can read how to do that in the wiki entry too. > (It will only work if you use the usb-creator to set up your stick). > > Thank you very much for your tests. > _______________________________________________ > SoaS mailing list > s...@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep