Linux on Mac

[tomfo...@gmail.com]

I am planning on putting Debian 8.2 (64-bit) on my mid-2010 Macbook Pro 6,2 with an Intel i7. After looking over the literature on Debian sites it seems as though it might be a challenge.  Does anyone have any experience installing Linux on Mac? Are you willing to impart advice or dire warnings? Thank you!

[Hippy Nerd]

Im using a macbook running ubuntu right now to post this message.

I found that it was easier to remove the hard disk, and install on a
faster computer. I replaced my original drive with an SSD drive, and
installed the OS on a dell, then plugged the drive into the mac.
iFixit has some good tutorials, im not sure if this was the one, but
one like it should make the hard disk thing easy.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Core+Duo+Hard+Drive+Replacement/282

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[tomfo...@gmail.com]

Hello, thank you for your reply. I am not sure what Macbook you are using as they have been issued over many years and with different hardware (to be able to compare it to mine). However, I am surprised that you would anticipate my hardware being slow. When you loaded Linux previously on the native Mac, was it burdensomely slow? Thank you!

[larry price]

There are couple of things you want to think about.

Are you going to want to dual boot? If so look at
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

There is a pretty extensive set of documentation on
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro

Some of which will be helpful no matter what distro you are installing.

Having had ReFit ( a previous iteration of ReFind ) it works fine but
it can seem like it takes forever.

I think most of the power management problems on Mac hardware have
been dealt with. Suspend and Sleep work fine now last time I used
Ubuntu.

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 8:35 PM, <tomfo...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Hippy Nerd]

My macbook is the first gen, 1,1. There was some kind of hassle
trying to install it, and it was just easier to pull the disk and
install via USB drive installer. Removing the disk drive was pretty
easy, remove the battery, a few screws, and it pops out.

I think that I installed it on the original disk, then later I decided
to upgrade to SSD, and I made a dual boot, but I almost never us OSX,
so I probably should have just used the whole SSD. When I did the dual
boot, I had to install ReFind boot loader to get it to dual boot.

[tomfo...@gmail.com]

Thanks, I have been considering dual boot and downloaded ReFit, but I am wanting to leave OSX behind, so maybe I will screw my courage and take the leap. My only non-mac laptop is an IBM Thinkpad (an actual IBM not Lenovo, so you can guess the age), I am not sure that swapping HDs is an option for me, but I appreciate your responses and advice. Thanks again!

[tomfo...@gmail.com]

Thank you for the advice/tips. I have downloaded ReFit, it is good to know that it has a successor. I will check out the documentation and do some more research. I am on the fence about the dual boot option but leaning towards a Linux only install. Do you have any experience with dual-boot vs. solo? Thanks again for your reply!

[Paul Merrell]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 1:26 PM, <tomfo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the advice/tips. I have downloaded ReFit, it is good to know
> that it has a successor. I will check out the documentation and do some more
> research. I am on the fence about the dual boot option but leaning towards a
> Linux only install. Do you have any experience with dual-boot vs. solo?
> Thanks again for your reply!

I don't have any experience with a Mac, but I found dual-boot with
Linux and Windows irritating beyond belief. The necessity of taking
the time to shut down all programs before rebooting plus the time to
reboot and open more programs plus directory navigation was just too
much. I would never set up another dual-boot system unless absolutely
required. So far, I am much happier using a virtual machine for the
second (or third or fourth) OS. I use Virtual Box, which lets me
switch back and forth between operating systems on the fly and has a
shared clipboard. But that might not work for you if your machine
doesn't have a healthy dose of RAM. VMs will still work in low-memory
situations but everything happens much slower. For me, 8 GB RAM has
worked just fine; 4 GB not nearly so well.

If you do try Virtual Box, I recommend the version downloadable from
the Virtual Box site over the completely open source version that
ships with Linux distros. The version at the Virtual Box site has some
proprietary extensions that give you more capabilities:

Support for a virtual USB 2.0/3.0 controller (EHCI/xHCI)
VirtualBox RDP: support for proprietary remote connection protocol
developed by Microsoft and Citrix.
PXE boot for Intel cards
VM disk image encryption

But again, I have no experience with Macs so can't recommend
VirtualBox for that use case.


Best regards,

Paul