jacque wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2023 8:47 am
I'd install Linux on my ancient MacBook Air if I knew how.
I recently did exactly this on 2 of my older MBPs, it's not overly difficult:
1. Download a Linux .ISO (I found that Linux Mint does a good job of respecting Apple hardware, even if it's not my favourite from the point of view of how it looks)
2. Download Balena Etcher
3. Get a USB stick with at least 8 Gb storage and which you don’t mind wiping completely
4. If you want to dual-boot, you need to partition the MBA drive, you should be able to do this with Disk Utility.app. Create a smaller partition the same size as your physical memory and call it SWAP. Create 2nd partition with as much storage as you can, call it LINUX or some such. Format them both as FAT-32.
Of course if you don’t want to dual-boot ignore this step.
5. Use Etcher to “flash” the USB with the .iso to create a bootable USB.
6. With the USB inserted reboot and hold down the the Option key as soon as machine reboots and choose the EFI drive that appears (this is the general way to dual boot even after Linux installation).
This will boot into Linux and you can either choose to either wipe the drive completely and supplant the existing OS completely or choose “Other” to install on partitions.
If the latter make sure you assign the SWAP partition as a swap and format the larger FAT-32 partition to ext4 and assign it as your root mounting at “/“.
7. I found that after installation, my WiFi didn't work on both occasions - this is a known issue and easily resolved: After installing Linux and rebooting, open the app for driver management and click 'use disk', having re-inserted the installation USB which actually contains the driver but doesn't install it automatically (annoyingly) - this should show at least one 'proprietary' driver for your WiFI (Apple uses Broadcom chipsets). Select the driver and reboot and the machine should then be fully ready to use.
From the point of view of the look and feel of the OS, I actually prefer ElementaryOS - early attempts with this stalled as I hadn't figured out how to sort the WiFi problem. I'll probably have another go at this when I have time and wipe my existing Linux Mint.
...Of course the bigger issue why bother: MacOS performs really quite well even on a heavily used 11 year old laptop (to the point that if this was my only machine I'd still be happy to use this other than for it's battery life, which Linux just makes worse), so I'm still trying to figure out if the effort was even worth it. The 'good' FOSS stuff on Linux largely exists for MacOS as well so I've yet to really grasp the actual value in this and really it was just an experiment as my old laptops have fallen into disuse
And in general, this is the problem with Mac hardware - they go on for years and perform quite well - upgrading is always an uneasy decision but once you do, you don't look back. But because they are lovely machines the older ones are hard to get rid of... I have a veritable graveyard of Macs that still work but which I don't know what to do with (from the late 80s onwards). But not sure installing Linux does much to improve usability (or maybe I just haven't yet found the added value of Linux).
S.
