Hello,
I've spent the past month or two occasionally looking high and low for some solid info to install Linux on 2 early 2008 Macbooks. One is the Macbook2,1 with a 32bit EFI and the other is the 4,1 with the 64bit boot loader. Long story short no other distro gave me an install that was relatively painless with this old machines.
For the Macbook2,1 Matt Gadient has a site with instructions to build install ISOs that can boot using a 32bit bootloader. I assume getting it to work with modern Ubuntu and Mint requires manually setting up 32bit Grub to boot into those 64Bit installs. But, from comments some people faced their system becoming unbootable after an upgrade.
While that's not and issue with the Mabook4,1 both Ubuntu and Mint would take a long time to load. It would sped minutes at an EFI Stub step (at least that was the message on the screen while I waited.) Plus shutting down would not complete properly. Forcing me to press the power button to force it.
So here's to Debian! Getting the iSight webcam took a little extra work. I had to download and build the package for that. I've had to install some other dependencies that I just pre-installed in other distros, but I have a stable install that's keeping these machines out of the trash.
I came across one post that mentions that Debian was the way to go because of its support for 32Bit bootloaders, but otherwise nothing much. So i am posting here, in case someone else if going down this same road.
Regards!
I've spent the past month or two occasionally looking high and low for some solid info to install Linux on 2 early 2008 Macbooks. One is the Macbook2,1 with a 32bit EFI and the other is the 4,1 with the 64bit boot loader. Long story short no other distro gave me an install that was relatively painless with this old machines.
For the Macbook2,1 Matt Gadient has a site with instructions to build install ISOs that can boot using a 32bit bootloader. I assume getting it to work with modern Ubuntu and Mint requires manually setting up 32bit Grub to boot into those 64Bit installs. But, from comments some people faced their system becoming unbootable after an upgrade.
While that's not and issue with the Mabook4,1 both Ubuntu and Mint would take a long time to load. It would sped minutes at an EFI Stub step (at least that was the message on the screen while I waited.) Plus shutting down would not complete properly. Forcing me to press the power button to force it.
So here's to Debian! Getting the iSight webcam took a little extra work. I had to download and build the package for that. I've had to install some other dependencies that I just pre-installed in other distros, but I have a stable install that's keeping these machines out of the trash.
I came across one post that mentions that Debian was the way to go because of its support for 32Bit bootloaders, but otherwise nothing much. So i am posting here, in case someone else if going down this same road.
Regards!
Statistics: Posted by secretsubscriber — 2025-02-27 16:16 — Replies 0 — Views 89