[SOLVED] Installing on a 2008 ish Macbook Pro

[Oli]

Just for the record... maybe it helps somebody.

Today I installed MX-23 on an old MacBook Pro (17 inch, mid 2009) from an USB stick. The existing Mac OS X "El Capitan" was left untouched and is still working without problems.

First the MX-23 boot stick was selected after holding the option/alt key during boot. Then I wiped the last Mac formated hfs+ partition with Gparted and created 3 new partitions for the MX-23 system (root, home and swap). Business as usual I thought...

But the installer complained a missing EFI partition whereas such a partition was already present due to the installed Mac OS X system. As I tried to use it the installer complained again regarding a minimum size of approx. 500 MB. The existing EFI partition was just too small.

So I had to wipe the partition a second time and now I created 4 partitions: a new EFI partition with a size of 1 GB (FAT32) and 3 partitions for root, home and swap.
After this the installer passed through and the GRUB bootloader was probably stored in the new EFI partition. Now the ssd structure looks like that:

Gparted.png

After reboot the system runs into GRUB without an existing option to start the Mac system. I suspect this is caused by the small EFI partition that was previously created from the OS X.

The Mac OS starts normally by pressing the option/alt key at boot and confirming the first Mac hfs+ partition as current boot device. After a reboot you automatically end up in GRUB again.
And yes, according to my impression MX-23 runs significantly faster and works like a charm on this old pal - just perfect.

Cheers,
Oli