Mac Mini as Plutohome MD: part II

After about three weeks I continued my work with Mac Mini. It turned out, that this Mac is Intel-based not PPC. So, all found manuals explained a process of installation Linux on Mac are useless now. I dive into Intel Mac boot process deeper and deeper. As you can know Apple doesn’t use archaic BIOS. It use Open Firmware for PowerPC and Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) for Intel-based macintoshes. Computer vendors are going to replace BIOS by EFI soon because BIOS has many limitations and becomes obsolete. Here is a brief comparison BIOS and EFI. Well, I spent a lot of time to find how to control Mac boot process. Recently I found excellent post about OS X boot keys. I decided to re-post it here just to remember them:

Press X during startup Force Mac OS X startup
Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete
during startup Bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume (such as a CD or external disk)
Press C during startup Start up from a CD that has a system folder
Press N during startup Attempt to start up from a compatible network server (NetBoot)
Press R during startup Force PowerBook screen reset
Press T during startup Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode
Press Shift during startup start up in Safe Boot mode and temporarily disable login items and non-essential kernel extension files (Mac OS X 10.2 and later)
Press Command-V during startup Start up in Verbose mode.
Press Command-S during startup Start up in Single-User mode (command line)

Also here is a good explanation of process of Mac network boot. It differs from PXE but I hope I’ll boot Mac Mini as Plutohome MD 🙂