Just make sure you’ve had your ethernet plugged in. Make sure not to touch the first three partions which already exit. Then partition your drive according to the table below.Upon booting from your Arch Linux live USB, run:.A swap partition is optional and I’m not going to go into it. You’ll then need a boot partition, root partition, and home partition. They can share the same partition.) Create a small bootloader partition using Apple’s HFS+ filesystem that you will later bless as bootable in your OSx install. Keep your EFI partition from the Mac (don’t create a separate EFI System partition for your linux drive. There are many options, but the simplest is the best in my opinion.

People usually get stuck on partitioning as well. Now you should be able to plug in the USB to your Macbook, hold the option key, and select to boot from the Arch Linux live USB. Mount the newly created FAT32 USB partition and copy the contents of the instalation media to the USB media.mnt/iso/loader/entries/archiso-x86_64.conf Change LABEL in the code to the one used in the Arch ISO configuration. Create a FAT32 filesystem in the partition on the USB.

Mount -o loop archlinux-2012.05.03-dual.iso /mnt/iso May work in OSx, but might as well just fire up a VM to be safe.įirst create a partition table with at least one partition on the USB.

These liveUSB instructions are for Linux. It isn’t clear anywhere else, but you do need to do a few specific things to create a live USB which will boot with Apple’s UEFI. The first caveat is with the installation media. Having an extra computer handy for Google and an ethernet plugged into your Macbook are definitely useful items to have. I got a lot of good information from other sources so I try to credit them where applicable, but a great resource especially worth mention is this post. While I’m going to do my best to clean it up and add information that I found helpful, I wanted to document my process as it may be helpful for others as well as provide a personal resource for future reference. The Arch Linux Wiki entry for Macbooks has gotten pretty messy and has a lot of conflicting information. The only difference in my hardware is the Samsung SSD, but I point out what to leave off if you have an normal HD. The installation process of Arch Linux on a Macbook Pro has quite a few caveats, but it is about the slickest machine I’ve ever run.

Arch linux macbook wifi b43