I’m wanting to install Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue on a 2019 Intel iMac to dual boot with Sonoma OS. I used Fedora Media Writer on Arch Linux to create bootable USB drives. Within Sonoma I both successfully installed ReFIND and with Disk Utility created a msdos partition for Fedora of 333G, leaving the remaining 667G for Sonoma.
The Kinoite installer is recognized by ReFIND and boots as expected. After choosing English as a language, an Installation Summary screen appears with a warning of “Automatic partitioning selected” under System Installation Destination. Clicking on this brings up a Device Selection dialog. Under Local Standard Disks there is only the “ATA APPLE HDD …” listed. The msdos formatted partition I created for Fedora is not shown, nor any other partitions. Selecting the ATA APPLE HDD with Automatic and “Free up space by removing or shrinking existing partitions” as Storage Configuration brings up the error message “No disks selected; please select at least one disk to install to” error message. However, nothing else is available for selection.
As for the Silverblue USB, it is not even recognized by ReFIND on booting. I have tried re-creating it with Fedora Media Writer to no avail. I’m more interested in Kinoite however.
To be honest, I’m not that familiar with installation of Linux on Intel Apple. I’ve had two iMacs donated to us that I don’t want to waste. So any help will be appreciated!
That is a user error.
Fedora will not automatically install into a pre-existing partition.
If there is unallocated space then fedora can use that to do an installation but not when the partition is already created.
The first (and maybe only) requirement is to remove that partition and then perform the installation.
Thanks for replying. I am not really Fedora savvy, though I have used it from time to time.
I already thought of this and resized the partition leaving 333G as unallocated space. Though this shows up in Disk Utility it does not show up when I try to install Fedora. No partitions at all are recognized, only the HDD, and that as a 1 terabyte device.
I am dual booting macOS and Fedora Workstation on an older Intel MacBook. Didn’t need to use rEFInd for that. I am only using Fedora atomic editions within VMs on newer Macs.
Your case is different though:
- You’re trying to install an atomic edition of Fedora on bare metal. There are some known limitation with dual booting. You might want to try installing a non-atomic version of Fedora first (Workstation or KDE Spin), to check if the issue is related to atomic editions only.
- Is your Mac shipped with T2 security chip? If so, then many of the peripherals are not working OOTB. Have a look at t2linux.org for details.
Thanks Mike for replying. This is my first experience with an atomic desktop, and from what research I did, I expected problems. We received two Intel iMacs, a 2015 model and a 2019, model, and you probably know that while OS X is an elegant OS, if you can ignore Apple telling you what’s best for you, it tends to get bloated and quickly obsolete within a few years time. The 2015 model runs Catalina and I’m keeping the 2019 at Sonoma, because, though Sequoia is offered, Sonoma is already extremely slow. Because of this I have no interest in using Fedora within a VM.
On Arch, using Qemu I was able to run both Silverblue and Kinoite with no problems as VMs. The Kinoite USB didn’t offer a live version for testing, only an installer, so I’m limited in actually testing it on the iMac hardware. I did try a ClearOS USB which has both installer and live version for testing and it worked fine. As a matter of fact ClearOS, even from an older USB stick, seemed faster than Catalina and that is part of my goal in installing Kinoite, to have a very secure and stable alternative to OS X that doesn’t require a lot of attention. OS X still works, which makes me hesitant to eliminate it.
Just checking out the ClearOS installer I found it a little different than Fedora’s. Choosing “Select Installation Media” I’m given the choice of a Safe Installation or Destructive Installation, which would wipe out OS X. The Safe Installation option shows no media for installation. The Destructive Installation shows the same HD icon that the Fedora installer did, but there is an Advanced Installation as well, where if I click “Partition Media” a dialog appears that shows the partitions exactly as I created them where I could presumably proceed, if I wanted to install Clear OS. Well, that wasn’t my intention, but it’s good to know the option is there.
What I was hoping from the Fedora Installer was something similar to the Advanced Installation option, but I couldn’t see how to work anything I saw.
Thanks again.