[Wolves] Installing Linux on a 8 year old mac book

[Paul Salahuddin Armstrong]

I installed openSUSE 42.1 (x64) on my wife's black Macbook from 2008, works
perfectly. The install was quite straightforward. I needed to install a
bootloader called "refind" to boot the DVD, but once this was done, install
was almost the same as for any PC.

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

After install, everything worked except the wifi, due to an absent
proprietary driver. This is easily fixed through adding the Packman
repository, and installing the Broadcom driver for wifi from the repo.
After that, everything has worked fine. The trackpad even works better than
in OS X, and a two-finger tap simulates the missing right trackpad button,
present in PC laptops.



On 7 March 2016 at 18:43, Barry W <baza41 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, seems it's not as easy as I was hoping :/ I've installed Linux on a few
> old PC's so I'm not a total noob at this, but this mac lark is very tricky.
> I've burnt the iso to a cd, so it should be a matter on shoving it in the
> drive, hitting c during boot etc. But no, the mac does not recognise the
> disk (I've tested it in a pc so I know the cd is ok). Also tried a USB
> install too, again no joy.
>
> On 22 February 2016 at 20:51, Mark Croft Redditch Linux Mint <
> mark.croft.lug at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > is apple being more open about the hardware now? i have apple machine
> > that has some sort of hardware fault just not got around to finding
> > out about it. I can't remember the details. all the hardware built
> > into the screen its about 10 years old i believe.
> >
> > just wonder if it worth getting it fixed and use linux on it.
> >
> > mark
> >
> > On 22 February 2016 at 20:34, Alex Willmer <alex at moreati.org.uk> wrote:
> > > On 22 February 2016 at 19:16, Barry W <baza41 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> OK. How easy or otherwise would it be to install linux (I'm thinking
> > >> Debian) on my old mac book?
> > >
> > > Probably quite easy, just burn a install disc, then boot from it by
> > > holding down c during power up. Be aware if it's 8 years old then the
> > > CPU may be a Core Duo, that means 32-bit only - no x86_64. See
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook#Model_specifications
> > >
> > > At 8 years old, even Macbooks have pretty good drivers on Linux. To be
> > > sure try it with a live CD/DVD e.g. https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
> > > --
> > > Alex Willmer <alex at moreati.org.uk> <http://twitter.com/moreati>
> > >
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-- 
Mr Paul Salahuddin Armstrong

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Director, Khilafah Online Ltd.

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