Machine:
1.42 GHz G4 Mac Mini (512MB)
OS X is getting a bit slow at times, that’s why I thought of giving it a try with Linux installing both OS X Tiger and Yellow Dog.
There are several Linux distributions available for those Macs made before Apple transitioned to Intel processors (i.e. PowerPC Macs with G3 G4 and G5 processors). Linux distributions I’ve considered were Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva and openSUSE. I ended up downloading Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.1 code-named Phoenix (from the TerraSoft website). This distro is free and its iso has 3.6 GB, I chose it because it’s the only one that’s made just for the PowerPC architecture and it seems to have a good support today and for the years to come].
Linux Distribution:
Linux is a powerful operating system beloved by coders and capable of breathing life into old Macs. In this feature we look at how to install Linux on a Mac - including how to completely replace. Put the USB stick into your Mac and press the power button while holding down Command ⌘+Option+O+F. At the prompt, type the following: boot usb1/disk@1:,yaboot Note: If you are booting linux then use,yaboot, but if you are booting a Mac OS use,tbxi. Note 2: If your stick is in the right side of the machine, then you need to do this. A Mac mini G4 can run some variants of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD and runs light-weight X11 desktop environments like LXDE and Xfce acceptably. There are also some 'experimental' OS options like MorphOS (Amiga-like) and Darwin (Apple's open source version of OS X without the Mac GUI). Everything I’ve read suggests that installing MorphOS on a G4 Mac mini is the easiest route. It makes installing MorphOS relatively painless (if you call overwriting a perfectly good Mac OS X.
Yellow Dog 5
The Yellow Dog 5 is a Fedora Core, RPM-based distribution.
Download the .iso file (from the TerraSoft website) and burn it onto a dvd.
If you are interested in the matter take a look at the TerraSoft site and here or here (in italian ->here).
How to install YDL and OSX (if you want to dual-boot Mac OS and Linux)
Step 1 – Back up your HD
Step 2 – Partition the Mac Mini HD [get out the gray Mac OS X Install Disc 1]
With Mac OS X running, insert the OS X Install Disc 1 that came with the Mac Mini. Run the installer from the disc and, when prompted, hit “restart”. The Mac Mini will reboot and load the OS X installer from the disc.
With the installer running, open on the “Installer” menu in the top left of the screen. Choose “Open Disk Utility”. From here we tell Disk Utility how we want to partition the hard disk. I have divided the 80 Gigs hard drive (real size is 74.5 GB) into 4 partitions:
3 volumes I have marked as “Free Space” (their filesystem – Format – will be specified during the Linux installation)
- one of 2 GB for Linux-SWAP
- one of 14 GB for Linux-ROOT [ext3]
- one of 8.5 GB for shared FAT32 filesystem (for sharing files between OSX and YDL)
1 volume of 50 GB I have marked as “OS X” with the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, which is the Mac OS X filesystem, HFS+.
Once done setting up the volumes as desired, click Partition on the lower right, and quit Disk Utility.
You’re ready to install OS X onto the partition you just created (the 50 GB one in my case).
Now OS X is installed, you only need to insert the YDL DVD and restart the system and make it so it will boot from the dvd-drive (I think I pressed C, I can’t remember). The Yellow Dog installation menu will appear and you will be guided to choose how to manage the Free Space partitions you have previously created.
Once you have both OSs installed, when turning on the Mac Mini, instead of rebooting directly into Mac OS X as before, it will now load a bootstrap from which you can hit the letter “L” to boot Linux, or “X” to boot Mac OS X. By default (not hitting any key) it will boot the Yellow Dog Linux.
First impressions:
Yellow Dog is cool, but I prefere OSX
After a few hours of Yellow Dog I had not figured out how to fix the sound (I had no sound!!!). There are some tweaks you really need to look after and it can take ages to find out. Things can be slow on OSX but they are hassle-free for the regular user. My suggestion is: Keep OSX as main system, install Yellow Dog if you are curious but don’t expect it to satisfy your regular needs (sound!!!).
[I dropped the YDL partition almost a year later and took its space back for a fresh install of OSX Tiger, feels good!]
Installing Ubuntu/Linux Mint on Macmini is easy, but getting it to work the way you normally want a PC to run is a bit difficult (meaning, run smoothly and making all peripherals work) :) I am trying to cover all the issues I had with linux installation process and getting Apple hardware to run happily with Linux.
Few things before we start,
- I assume that you have a reasonable knowledge in *nix based OSes and commands.
- You need a stable power supply ;)
- A Mac mini late 2012 with OSX in a perfect state (if not you can reinstall OSX to start with, I did that)
- A keyboard and mice
- A monitor or two so you can see whats going on :)
NOTE: I reinstalled macosx before installing Linux and recreated the partitions table with two (using apple disk utility), since I had a 1TB drive, I split it into two equal partitions and reinstalled mac on the first (512GB was used).
I left the second partition untouched, meaning unformatted. I dont think this is a must but just saying what my configuration was...
Intro
Macmini comes with an UEFI bootloader, the easiest way to get multiple OSs to run with the machine is through rEFInd, you can download it from the link below.
As far as I can see rEFInd is a software layer for UEFI based computers so that you can esily run multiple OSes with a nice menu driven interface so that users can switch between them easily.
Download the 'Binary zip file' from the link below.
After downloading, extract the zip, 'cd' into the folder and run 'sudo ./install.sh'
it will show some messages and install the complete installation.
Reboot, if rEFInd is installed correcty you will see the menu at the time of booting...
(ver 0.7.4 as of 05-Sep-2013, Binary zip archive)
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.7.4/refind-bin-0.7.4.zip/download
Installation process
The installation should be straightforward until you get to the point where you choose the paritions setup. You need to choose 'Something else' from the harddisk setup/partition section, then in the partition editor
chose the 2nd partition you left blank in the mac disk partitioning utility (check the note above), use the blank partition to setup your favourite partition table.
A video clip explaining manual disk partitioning in Mint.
In the 'Device for bootloader installation' dropdown please select the root partition or /boot/ partition you created in the partition table. Never use any of the block devices used by the Mac OSX, in mine they were the device itself /dev/sda and /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2
Once the partitions are confirmed and the bootloader installation device is set, proceed with the installation.
Low colour depth in the second monitor
If you have a dual monitor setup, they you will notice that sometimes one of the monitors display less colours than the other one. I read somewhere that this issue happens in EFI based machines with Intel HD xxxx video cards, but I am not exactly sure the reason behind it.
The permanent fix for this would be to alter a configuration register for the Intel HD video card. The way I prefer for this is through the /etc/profile file.
Add the following line
Save the file and exit. In the next boot colours will be normal on monitors.
Broadcom wireless BCM4331 chipset
Broadcom chips are not supported well with linux, if you need more information about why the Arch linux documentation provides a good inside (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless).
Lets get the wifi driver installed,
You need to make sure that repository sources are set to download and compile drivers from the source package itself, inorder to enable source code repositories refer to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu#Adding_Ubuntu_Software_Repositories, usually in linux mint/ubuntu in 'Software sources' application should have a option to enable 'source code' option.
After enabling source packages open up a terminal and run following commands, in order to compile a package from the source, you need kernel headers and debian package developer tools.
And make sure the opensource drivers are disabled, in order to disable them edit the kernel modules config file and make required changes as follows
add following lines to the bottom of the file
Reboot the machine and wireless should be up and running..! ;)
Suspend to ram (S3)
If you really don't care about suspending your mac mini reliably so that you can save trees ;) and got wireless working perfectly, you can skip this section. If you need to get both suspend and wifi working, continue.
In latest ubuntu release the kernel 3.8.xx does not reliably able to put Mac mini to sleep, I couldn't figure out the exact reason but, after lot of trial and error I figured out that kernel-3.11.xx can reliable suspend Mac mini.
But the drawback with installing the latest kernel is that wifi driver stops compiling as per the kernel header changes in the kernel-3.10.0.
If you follow the guide to the letter you should be able to apply the patch I have submitted to the bcm-kernel-source package and get it to compile and install correctly.
Step 1: Create a temp directory to get download and run kernel updates.
Step 2: Get the kernel packages as per your processor architecture from the link below. You should download THREE packages from the link linux-headers-generic, linux-headers, linux-image. Since all latest mac mini run Core iX processors you can safely download 64bit packages.
Linux For Mac Mini G4 User
Step 3: Error messages and the fix
At the time of writing bcmwl-kernel-source didn't compile using kernel-hearders 3.11.0 and get the error mentioned in the below paragraph, and I have submitted a patch in the ubuntu launchpad. You can check the status of the package in the URL at the end of the document, if it says the package is updated, you don't have to worry about running any of the below commands.
After running dpkg command you may see an error which says check make.log for debug information, that means the wireless driver failed to compile and install correctly. But dont worry just restart your computer so that the next time computer will boot up with the latest kernel we just installed. Please note that the wireless will not work after the reboot (this is due to the wl.ko kernel module error we got), so make sure you got another device with this tutorial open so you can continue reading.
After restarting, download the patch I have attached in the launchpad bug report and copy it to the bcmwl-kernel-source directory as follows and recompile the code.
After editing dkms.conf you will see 10-15 lines as follows and add the line into the file and save.
Step 4: Reconfigure bcmwl-kernel-source
If you have done all the above steps correctly, you should be able to run the following command and recompile the bcmwl driver without compile time errors.
Step 5: Check if the driver is installed
You should see a file called wl.ko and thats it!
Mac G4 Computer
Reboot your machine and wireless should come up. You can try to load the kernel module by running 'sudo modprobe wl' in the terminal as well without getting module not found errors.
If anyone is interested this is the bug that we just fixed https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bcmwl/+bug/1197586
These are all the problems I experienced while using Linux with my Mac mini in the first two weeks, and hope this document would help one of you brave linux users to run your favourite distro on one of the best hardware provided by Apple :)
Drop a comment if you found any other issues with Mac minis and Linux, I am happy to help.