Here's what didn't work:
- Creating bootable USB drives using the following method http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx
- The default 64 bit 12.04.3 server image
- The default 64 bit 12.04 desktop image
- The default 64 bit 13.04 desktop image
- All three of these show up as 3 options when booting and fail to start the installer
- Then I discovered that there are mac specific images for 12.10 and 13.04 - I chanced upon these and never once saw them mentioned in any guide that I read elsewhere. Check the releases site, eg. http://releases.ubuntu.com/raring/
- Still I had problems with 13.04 desktop - it installed but would not boot into the desktop unless I started it in recovery mode. I almost got caught up in trying to make this work but then remembered I only wanted a headless server install in the first place
So here's what did work:
- The 64-bit Mac (AMD64) server install image worked fine and now I have what I wanted (almost - I would have preferred the 12.04.3 LTS version but I can live with 13.04)