IMHO, the best way to install Linux on a Mac when Linux is to be the only OS is to do so in BIOS mode. That is, put an MBR partition table on the disk and a BIOS-mode boot loader (probably GRUB 2, if you're installing Mint). This usually works better than doing an EFI-mode installation because the Mac's EFI is rather weird, and Linux tools tend to cater to the more common EFI variants found on PCs. Doing as I suggest would not use rEFInd (or rEFIt).hflaxman wrote:My question now relates to a 5,2 white MacBook that I want to run Mint 16 as the sole OS. I will not use OS X at all if it isn't needed.
OTOH, doing it this way will make it more complex to install OS X in the future, should you want to do so, and will make it harder to upgrade your firmware, should you have need to do so. If you want to install Linux in EFI mode to facilitate these possible future actions, then you can choose to use [url=http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/]any of the available EFI boot loaders for Linux.[/url] Mint uses GRUB 2 by default, but you can use rEFInd instead of or in addition to GRUB 2, if you like. The problem is that Mint probably won't set up GRUB correctly, so you'll need to use OS X to set it up correctly, track down and use the Linux port of "bless", or use a workaround such as naming the boot loader EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi on the ESP. You'd need to do one of these things to get rEFInd working, too.