Porteus

@fanthom, @brokenman:
One of my students of Informatics for Civil Engineers put a Porteus 09-32 CD in his Mac-Laptop and started it. I was attonished to see that it worked!!!!

would be nice to check if booting from usb is also possible. Have seen an support for reading/writing hfs+ so accessing of MAC partitions should be there.
If it's not, then i maybe we could change the kernel config to make it available

Cheers

@fanthom
I remember the student choose Load in Ram; tomorrow afternoon he will come again to laboratory, I'll make the test with usb and inform you, also the specific Mac model. Imagine Porteus V1.0-multiplataform!!

Have a nice evening!

Yes i saw quite a few kernel options for mac. It shouldn't have any problems since i believe Mac OS X is using the XNU operating system kernel which is a Mach kernel derivative. I can't imagine someone would pay all that money for a mac, then replace the OS with linux.

@brokenman
This is right with the expensive Mac, and that's even the point: normally Mac-owners look down to us PC-owners.

Imagine the reaction of that guy, when you said: "please, may I use your Mac to take a look at some files I have in this USB-stick?"

And, when the 64-bits version will be doing all the 3D pirouettes with KDE4, the sensation of triumph will then be superb!, won't it?

Nice evening to you!

Most certainly. A photo of their facial expression from their builtin webcam would be ideal, but i fear you would have to download the camera drivers, then tweak the .rc file a little and finally find you needed to modprobe the kernel module.

.... But you would look way cool doing it!

@fanthom

I owe you this answer:
We tried usb on the Mac-Laptop. That model had no usb start option, it had only hd and cdrom.

So we started booting with the cd-rom to switch to plop. Plop presented the usb option okay, but the boot didn't work.

Something is missing on the usb side of the Mac, I think.
The usb we used was formatted for windows, vfat or ntfs, whatever usual in ms.

Best regards!

plug usb stick with porteus on it to Mac usb port then boot from CD with 'nocd' cheatcode - will work for 99%
(Mac usb controller must be supported by the kernel)

will add it to the tips and tricks too

Yes - i know that it's now what we wont here. At least we should know if controller is supported by Porteus kernel. I'm aware that bypassing Efi ( Mac BIOS) limitations may be a quite hard task.

@wread:
What was the version of mac os? I have a mac laptop circa 2004 with mac os x 10.3.9, a powerbook g4. My impression is that it is too old.

I don't even get in the bios with command+o+f