Why won't my MacBook Pro boot from a Linux Live CD? Whenever I try to boot up from a live cd, it starts to boot and then it tells me:


  No bootable file system available.


It's an Early 2011 MacBook Pro 13" 8,1 with the 2.3 GHz Core i5.

What's going on?
Macs use the EFI Firmware (BIOS for Windows).

You need to download a special Mac ISO that allows to boot on both BIOS and EFI Systems.


For Ubuntu 11.10 you can download the specific Mac image here:
64-bit Mac (AMD64) desktop CD

By experience I know that the following distros allow to boot on EFI systems using the "standard" ISO: Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint


Your questions is related to this here on askubuntu.