spiralofhope

Apple Macbook Pro A1278 - 13" Laptop, Ventoy >

Ventoy does not officially support a mac, but getting a Linux ISO working turns out to be trivial, and all the hardware "just works".

Note: I did not bother troubleshooting even a tiny bit. I only wanted my Lubuntu persistence setup to work, and it does. Feel free to comment if you have suggestions or successes.

Using Ventoy 1.0.82

With an Apple Macbook Pro A1278 - 13" Laptop (Mid 2012)

For OpenCore this Macbook is MacBookPro9,2 and for board-id is Mac-6F01561E16C75D06

• Power off
• Insert USB stick with working Ventoy and ISOs. My Macbook has two USB ports; either will work.
• Power on
• Hold control while powering up
• (the boot selector is seen)
• Select your USB stick. Perhaps it is called "EFI Boot" or "Ventoy". The choice will be orange with a large USB symbol.
• Press enter
• When Ventoy is seen, press control-r (to enter GRUB2 mode, you will see that text in red at the bottom)
• Select the ISO
• Press enter

• Use any default boot options that distribution presents. (Perhaps press enter a few times)

Tested and working with these live distributions:

• Devuan - devuan_chimaera_4.0.0_amd64_desktop-live.iso
• kali-linux-2021.2-live-amd64.iso
• Linux Mint - linuxmint-20.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso
• Lubuntu - lubuntu-20.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso (with persistence)

• Ubuntu - ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso

This did not work with:

• PCLinuxOS - pclinuxos64-kde5-magnum-2021.0215.iso
• MX Linux - MX-21.1_ahs_x64.iso
• MX Linux - MX-21.1_fluxbox_x64.iso
• tails-amd64-4.19.iso
• Ventoy - ventoy-1.0.82-livecd.iso
• Windows 10 (downloaded from Microsoft on 2021-06-05)

• Windows 11 - Win11_English_x64v1.iso

Note that if you are testing multiple distributions, then it is best to power off the system. Simply rebooting may not present the USB stick as a boot option.

Using Wimboot mode (instead of control-r, press control-w from the Ventoy ISO select screen) worked for Windows, although I did not attempt to install them:

• Windows 10 (downloaded from Microsoft on 2021-06-05)

• Windows 11 - Win11_English_x64v1.iso

macOS (Install_macOS_10.15.7-19H15.iso) failed with both control-r and control-w although I'm uncertain if I built it right or not.

Last updated 2022-12-24 at 06:14:08