How to boot JayOS on an Intel-based Mac using two USB sticks


This procedure was tested on a second-generation Mac Mini, 
YMMV with iMacs, Macbooks and Macbook pros

firmware

What you will need:
- one Mac Mini
- 1 GB USB stick (EFI bootloader)
- 1 GB USB stick (Linux + GNU applications)



Download this compressed image and use dd to create the bootloader stick.
If under Linux, your USB stick shows up as /dev/sdb, then your command
might look something like: gzip -dc JayOS-stick1.img.gz| dd of=/dev/sdb.

After creating it, you can mount it and look around; not much there except
for rEFIT on a GPT partition table.



Download this image (also compressed) to create the OS stick.
Once again, your command line might read: 
gzip -dc JayOS-stick2-img.gz| dd of=/dev/sdb

This stick has two partitions, one HFS+ and one Win32. The former is an
extremely small spare, while the later contains Grub, the kernel and
initial ramdisk, root, usr, and opt filesystems.




The only devices that should be attached when starting are 
power, video, kbd/mouse.


Step One:

Plug in both sticks and turn the machine on.


Step Two:

The rEFIt bootloader GUI should show at least one bootable device.
Choose apropriately.


Step Three:

After a video blink or two, the Grub menu will display. Hitting any key
will stop the seven second counter and place Grub into manual mode.

The default boot options will conserve RAM by mounting the usr filesystem
directly from stick 2.  If you have a GB or more of RAM installed,
the usrram mode will load the usr filesystem into a 600 MB ramdisk.

After you choose an option or the timer expires, the grub menu will
disappear and control of the boot sequence is turned over to the kernel
and initial ramdisk. 

IMPORTANT:  You must remove stick 1 immediately after the kernel takes
control, roughly between the time the first messages start scrolling and
when video goes into framebuffer mode and a penguin (or two) shows in the
corner of the screen. Failing to do will at worst panic the kernel if it
can't figure out which stick to load the root filesystem from.

I know, I know... Can I call that a feature?