Installing Debian Etch on a MacBook Core Duo 2

I recently bought a new Macbook, well one of the first things I did was installing Debian. The instructions in the corresponding Debian Wiki Page work pretty well, except I didn’t want to install lilo because it is just too annoying and error prone to run /sbin/lilo every time I changed something in the boot loader configuration. It turns out that the grub shipped with edge is capable to boot a macbook. The only thing you have to do is change the partition type of your /boot partition. So just proceed the Debian installation as explained on the Debian Wiki, when you drop to the console to sync the MBR from the GPT change the filesystem type as shown bellow. Adjust the index (in my case 4 for /dev/sda4) to the partition containing grub to match your setup.

sfdisk -c /dev/sda  83

This worked for me. The only other thing which annoyed me a bit is the keyboard and touchpad configuration. Update your touchpad config within xorg.conf as explained on this page and for the keyboard use these hints.

Enjoy your GNU/Linux powered Macbook!

Marc