Linux install on mac mini

TechnoZeal

This post is part of a series of installation guide to install Linux on Mac Mini (late 2009) version. For other Linux distribution, please refer to the list at the bottom of this post.

Video and Wifi Driver

As we have mention in the main post, the video and wifi driver will be our main stumbling block. Based on our experience testing with various distribution, same driver can behave differently in different distribution. For Linux Mint, we find that third party driver will cause us more problem. The recommended Broadcom BCM4321 wifi driver does not work at all. We need to install another driver. If we install Nvidia display driver, the windows will not launch if we boot the system with monitor attached. The best solution is use the default nouveau video driver.

Preparing USB Boot Drive

Preparing USB boot drive is quite straight forward. Please be aware that for Linux Mint 19, there are problem with the original installation image (linuxmint-19-cinnamon-64bit). The installer will crash unless we disable network connection. The developer did not remove the original image, instead they introduce another version (linuxmint-19-cinnamon-64bit-v2). Please download version 2 of Linux Mint 19 instead of the original one. Preparing USB driver is the same as Ubuntu, download Etcher and burn to USB driver using this tool.

Booting Up Linux Mint from USB

To boot up from Mac, press option key (Alt for windows keyboard) when the Mac chimes during startup. The boot menu will show various boot drive. Select the USB drive.

Please note that if the OS hang during boot up, we might need to clear SMC or reset PRAM. Please search the web on the shortcut or check out our main post here. If SMC and PRAM has been reset and you still encounter problem, you might need to check the package or change USB driver.

Installing Linux Mint 19

Make sure third party software are checked so that we can install other software such as vlc. Click Continue.

Select Erase data and install Linux Mint and click Install Now. The system will present to us how the system will partition the drive. Basically Linux Mint need 2 partition. The first partition is about 500MB formatted with FAT32. It will mount /boot/efi with boot flag as boot, esp. The rest of the dis space is use to mount the root system.

The location map is used to set your time zone. Select your appropriate time zone and click Continue.

Enter host name, user name and password. Click Continue. The system will proceed to install the software.

Install Wifi Driver

As mention earlier, the driver recommended for us in Driver Manager is not good. Please make sure we do not install these driver.

Since third party repository are included, we can install gparted or vlc from the app.

Related Post

Please also check out the main post on re-purposing old Mac Mini. This post also include the installation of Ubuntu on Mac Mini. We have also include hardware specification and other consideration in the main post.

Please also check out the summary result of testing various Linux distribution on Mac Mini (late 2009).
Install Linux on Mac Mini (late 2009) Result Summary

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Источник

andrsd / arch-mac-mini.md

We will be creating dual boot for OS X and Linux with no special boot loader. For other setup, refer to [1]. We will keep all data on an external hard drive, so we do not need huge amount of space for the linux system. We will install from an USB thumb drive (will need at least 1GB in size), newer Minis do not have CD roms.

Prepare the disk in Mac OS X (El Capitan)

• Open Disk Utility and select the disk (not partition), click Partition (top tool bar)
• There are at least 3 partitions: EFI, OS X, Recovery. Only OS X will be shown.
• Repartition your disk as follows:
  1. OS X (size: ~ tens of GB, type HFS+, for OS X)
  2. Arch tmp (size: ~ 10 GB, FAT, will be removed later)

Create LiveUSB that we will boot from

• Download the .iso from download page
• Open Terminal
• $ diskutil list and find out its name (let’s say it is /dev/disk2 )
• $ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 to unmount the drive
• # dd if=/path/to/arch-linux-image.iso of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m (we replaced disk with rdisk which is the «raw» disk in OS X and a lot faster, it is not a typo)
• $ diskutil eject /dev/disk2

• Connect to network
  • $ wifi-menu to setup wireless networking (assuming DHCP is available)
  • $ timedatectl set-ntp true
  • Check its status $ timedatectl status
  • # cgdisk
  • Remove the Arch tmp partition we created earlier.
  • Remember to create 128 MB gap after OS X partitions, by typing +128M for the start of the partition.
  • Add new Arch boot partition (~ 100 MB)
  • Add new Arch root partition (fill the space)
  • Swap file can be created later if needed
  • # mkfs.ext2 /dev/
  • # mkfs.ext4 /dev/
  • # mount /dev/ /mnt
  • # mkdir /mnt/boot
  • # mount /dev/ /mnt/boot
  • # vim /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist it will be used pac the next step, so take good care of it here
  • # pacstrap /mnt base
  • # genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
  • # arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
  • # echo > /etc/hostname
  • # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo// /etc/localtime
  • # nano /etc/locale.gen uncomment locales you want
  • # locale-gen
  • # echo LANG= > /etc/locale.conf
  • TODO: setup wireless networking
  • # mkinitcpio -p linux
  • # passwd
  • # pacman -S gptfdisk
  • # mkdir /boot/efi
  • # mount /dev/
  • # pacman -S grub efibootmgr
  • # grub-install —target=x86_64-efi —efi-directory=/boot/efi —bootloader-id=arch
  • # grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

  # Set bluetooth power up ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="hci0", RUN+="/usr/bin/hciconfig hci0 up" 

  Let’s assume wlan is out interface for this setup.

  • Install b43-firmware from AUR
  • pacman -S wpa_supplicant
  • # vim /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan.conf

  ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant update_config=1 

  > scan > scan_results > add_network > set_network 0 ssid "MYSSID" > set_network 0 psk "passphrase" > enable_network 0 > save_config 

  Use systemd to start the service:

  • # ln -s /usr/share/dhcpcd/hooks/10-wpa_supplicant /usr/lib/dhcpcd/dhcpcd-hooks/
  • # systemctl enable dhcpcd@wlan

  Источник