Dual Boot OSX Catalina + Manjaro w/ rEFInd on MacBook Air 11" (2010)

Support
1

I made the Manjaro installation USB with Etcher on Win10. Not sure if this makes a difference.

I am trying to install Manjaro on a MacBook Air 11" (2010) that has OSX Catalina (APFS). I installed rEFInd through OSX. Rebooted. At rEFInd I loaded up the installation USB and made my way through till “Partitions”. Once there, I did the following.

Clicked on “Manual partitioning”
Created a new “/boot/efi” partition, 300MB, FAT32, Flagged “/boot” and “/boot/efi”
Created a new OS partition, 55GB, ext4, Mount Point “/”
Created a swap partition, 2GB, linuxswap

After the installation and restart, I get some weird error msgs. I reboot + hold down Option key. Boot into OSX then reinstall rEFInd. Reboot again to rEFInd screen. Boot into Manjaro. I get a “failed to start light display manager” msg and it just hangs there. What am I doing wrong? I would appreciate any help.

Sincerely,
Girl Lost in Manjaro

2

Hello and welcome,

If i’m not reading this wrong, you should install grub on /boot the legacy way, and rEFIt should take it automatically at next reboot.

Maybe you will need to add some custom kernel boot parameters. Usually we parrot a lot of stuff from arch wiki, so maybe is worth to read it first hand
https://www.linuxsecrets.com/archlinux-wiki/wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mac.html#rEFIt