Install Linux On Old Imac Computers

3/24/2018by
Install Linux On Macbook

Want to install Linux on an iMac? This HowTo should help you with the most critical points. This HowTo works for many different Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. Oct 21, 2013 Hi, I was given an old imac and have been trying to install linux on to it - I partitioned the hard disk and tried rebooting with both a live cd and a.

Got one of those shiny Mac laptops, but Linux has you realising computer freedom is best? This is the definitive guide!

Using a Macintosh is (mainly) a delight. The hardware is solid, fast, and beautiful, but over time, macOS has become dumbed down and in some places, downright silly.

I long since realised that I could do exactly what I wanted to do with my macbook with Linux, rather than being encumbered by having to follow the ‘Apple’ way of doing things. I never looked back. Here’s the definitive guide to installing Linux on a Mac. NOTE: This is an advanced tutorial which works at the command line and can cause irreparable damage to your data. If you are a novice, it is not recommended that you undertake this tutorial. If you do proceed, make sure you have backed everything up with TimeMachine or such like tools. I must also acknowledge the awesome work of Jessie Frazelle, her blog entitled ‘Linux or Death’ was the inspiration for this article, and much of it is cribbed from there, simply because it worked, unlike any other blog on the subject we found on the interwebs!

This tutorial has been tested on a late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 15″, however it should work with any EFI based Mac (more on that in a bit). The EFI based Macintosh started around 2008 (you can check the list of the Apple EFI systems ). This should include Macbook Pros, Macbook Air, iMac and probably Mac Pro’s Step 1: Dual Booting with Mac OS (yes, you can keep MacOS/OS X!) I am also working on the basis that you want to keep Mac OS X on your hard drive and that you wish to dual-boot it at any time. You should have plenty of free space on your disk drive (the more the better), so either delete some cruft or move some of your old data onto a separate external archive hard drive (because I know you got one or ten of them lying around!). Finally, we used Mac OS X 10.11.1, ‘El Capitan’, which is the latest OS X at the time of the release. El Capitan introduced a ‘security feature’ called ‘SIP’ (System Integrity Protection) which you will additionally have to overcome if you are using El Capitan or newer. More on that in a bit.

We will be installing Ubuntu. Originally this tutorial was written with Ubuntu GNOME 15.10, but this should apply to any Linux distro (including Ubuntu 17.04 and later) more or less, although your mileage may vary with Video stuff particularly. The tutorial you are about to read has six main sections.

These are: • Installing the EFI boot manager • Downloading and converting your Linux distro of choice • Partitioning your hard drive • Installing Linux • Finishing up and nice to have items, including being able to see your Macintosh files from Linux. Installing the EFI boot manager EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface and is now pretty much commonplace in Macs and PCs across the industry. It replaced the trusty old BIOS system that PCs had used since the 1980s.

Installing Linux on a BIOS based machine was trivial, but now with Apple’s take on EFI on their customised hardware, it can be a little challenging. No worries, this is the Ultimate Linux Newbie Guide. Download rEFInd The red circle indicates where to download rEFInd rEFInd is a boot-loader for EFI based machines. Think of it like bootcamp, or GRUB for GRUB 🙂 You’ll want to download rEFInd from the rEFInd website: • Now, if you take a look around the rEFInd website, you’ll see it looks like the guy that wrote it believes in punishing everyone that wants to use it. Romantic Guitar Songs Free Download. It took us about 20 minutes just to find the frigging download link!

So the ULNG has taken the time to go through all the pertinent steps to make it shit tons easier for you! The version of rEFInd that we used is 0.10.0, and we used the Once you download the binary, you are going to need to start the rest of your work from the Terminal, so open up the Terminal from the Utilities folder on your Macintosh and head over to your Downloads folder where you saved rEFInd to. If the zip archive is not already unzipped, unzip it using the unzip command and head into the newly created refind-bin-0.11.0 folder: $unzip refind-bin-0.11.0.zip $cd refind-bin-0.11.0 For the next step, take a note of the full directory where you downloaded the refind tool into.

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