Powerless Mac
You’ve piqued my interest with the item about adding Linux to a MacBook. I’m dual-booting one with Linux Mint 18.1 and a minimal install of OS X 10.7.5. I also run an ancient Tangerine iMac G3 DV, which started life running OS 9 but it has been dual-booting Debian 6 and Tiger for a few years now (I guess that it’s time to upgrade Debian!).
Both boxes run Linux better than they do OS X or MacOS, with the exception that the iSight camera on the 2008 MacBook hasn’t yet been tested. I’m told that it can be problematic. Hopefully, the article will cover how to solve any problems.
A friend has a MacBook Pro, and he will be wanting me to install Mint onto that soon (the second computer which I’ve converted to the ‘Light Side’ for him), and I’ll be adding (probably) Debian to a G4 iBook sometime in the next few months. Well, it did cost me an extortionate £3.20 including delivery, complete with a protective carrying bag and a music CD that had been left in the machine from eBay five years ago, so I need to get my money’s worth, don’t I?
Oh, and this iMac has just about lost support from MacOS upgrades: it’s running an unsupported install of Sierra [hacked]. Sierra is, frankly, a waste of storage space – it’s ugly, slow, crippled, memoryhungry, and not a patch on OS X from five years ago. So guess which favourite OS is nudging to take over its hard drive platters?
There are plenty of really old Macs out there − at least Apple built them to last − so how about an article sometime about resuscitating PPC boxes, with ideas about boot loaders, wireless networking, etc? I’ve more-or-less figured it all out, but there will be others who don’t even know that Linux can be run on their museum pieces. RWB,viaemail Neil says: We hope you found the Mac install guide useful, but it did only focus on modern Apple hardware. Supporting PowerPC hardware didn’t really cross our minds, though Linux has been a refuge for old PowerMac users. However, it seems that Ubuntu support ground to a halt with 14.04 LTS and Debian shuttered PowerPC architecture support in 2016. We’d imagine this is partly down to everyone winding up 32-bit support and possibly other quirks of the aging PowerPC architecture.