I believe I figured out the cause of the issue.
It was indeed an incompatibility with the way the Apple hardware communicated with the VESA drivers, I believe when switching modes on the built-in screen. When nomodeset
was added to the kernel parameters, system could proceed to boot without crashing.
The Macbook Pro is Late 2008, 5,1 with nVIDIA 9600m GT.
nomodeset
is only necessary until you can install the proprietary nVIDIA drivers for your distro.
To recap:
- Installed rEFIt while in OS X (run
/efi/refit/enable.sh
if rEFIt does not work automatically) - I ran the Mint 14 live DVD by adding
nomodeset
to the kernel parameters in the grub bootloader. - Ran Mint installer
- Did partitioning
- mounted / to /dev/sda4, also installed grub to this partition
- swap on /dev/sda3 (because I placed some space in-between the Mac partition)
- Finished mint installer, rebooted.
- Booted from linux partition using rEFIt.
- Again, added
nomodeset
to kernel parameters so I could boot. - Ran Software Sources application
- Went to Additional Drivers tab
- Selected first NVIDIA driver (proprietary, tested), applied changes
- Waited for it to finish, then rebooted.
- Booted into linux again and all was well (
nomodeset
automatically removed as it is a temporary change)
Phew.