Budgie can't display GUI in live session on a Mac

FTouzain

Hello.
I try to start live usb solus on a old mac mini (with basic nvidia gpu and of course intel CPU).

normal mode gives me a pink background, mouse arrow but no menues and login session
nomodeset mode gives black screen
debug mode gives me like normal mode (messages before tells me everything is ok)

So, to get login in debug mode, I did Ctrl Alt F2 (pc keyboard) and I go to tty session with login:live

I installed nvidia lts drivers, and now, I would like to start a budgie session. How can I do it please?
(like startx on old linux).

my aim is to increase EFI to be able to update solus (I backed up Mac OS on a firewire external hard drive, cloned it on a second partition I made using Disk Utility to let a sufficient space to increase EFI using gparted).

maybe I could use parted? (but I am not familiar with it)

TraceyC

It sounds like there are two issues here.

You are looking to increase the size of the EFI partition.

You can use parted for this, if you only have access to TTY. I recommend following an online guide, to avoid destroying partitions other than the EFI partition.
From the Solus help page on the EFI partition, keep in mind:

Your system must be booted using Unified EFI (UEFI) mode, as opposed to a "legacy (BIOS) mode".
Your disk is required to be GPT formatted.
If you cannot see your SSD drive, set the SATA configuration to AHCI.

Budgie doesn't display properly in the live ISO environment

It sounds like Budgie is already started, so trying to start it again in TTY won't help.
What might help is a newer ISO that has newer drivers. I'll send you a message later today after work about that.

FTouzain

TraceyC

Thank you for your answer.

Yes I try to increase the size of the EFI partition. Being on a mac mini, I:
- cloned the mac system on an external firewire disk using Carbon Copy Cloner
- booted on this external firewire hardrive
- in Apple Harddrive utility, I:
  - decreased the size of the current Mac partition (impossible to get smaller than 23 Go)
  - created new mac partition and
  - cloned mac system on this second partition using Carbon Copy Cloner (I specify it because Mac Hardrive utility is supposed to be able to do this but is not).
  - tried to remove first mac partition: Apple Hardrive Utility is bugged and does not allow it because according to it: you cannot remove first partition (everybody knows that the first partition is UEFI and not the mac partition but anyway apple utility does not distinguish them...)

So. To increase UEFI partition I expected to:

remove first mac partition using parted (really only mac partition, not UEFI of course)
create a new partition at the same place, formatted in FAT32
validate it in Parted to make this disk portion a FAT32 one

because I suppose that I need this format to increase UEFI partition size in a quite clean way

remove in Parted this new FAT32 partition and validate
increase UEFI to 1 GB (currently 200 MB) and validate

Then I planned to:

boot on solus usb key and
install solus after mac partition

2- Budgie doesn't display properly in the live ISO environment: for sure, I used the last ISO available at this date on Solus website. Thank you for your proposition.

Just one note: I had Solus on this mac mini in addition to mac system, but it became impossible to update (due to kernel) because of the small size of the UEFI partition).