About Me

I am a citizen of the world. I live in the cyberspace. I belongs to the race of computer geeks. Logic is my religion.

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Revive Old Mac Mini (2009) with Linux

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We have an old Mac Mini (late 2009 version) lying around. The latest Mac OS X it could support was Mac OS X El Capitan. The machine is still good although the DVD drive does not worked anymore.  Apple will drop security update for El Capitan very soon. Running OS X El Capitan without any security update is not an option.  Instead of disposing a good piece of hardware, we can install Linux. However, before we start playing around with the Linux installation, we need to take stock of the hardware capability. We might need to upgrade some hardware so that we can run Linux smoothly. Mac Mini 2009 Specification This Mac has Core 2 Duo CPU (P8700) running at 2.53GHz. It support PC3-8500 DDR3 RAM running at 1066MHz. This Mac Mini has a Nvidia Geforce 9400M video card. It support 2 display output. Wifi specification is 802.11a/b/g/n. This is pretty high end at the time.  However, this WiFi uses Broadcom chipset (BCM4321), which is not very well supported in L...
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Install CentOS 7 on Old Mac Mini (late 2009)

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This installation is also one of the less successful installation. However, we manage to get it work without wifi enabled. For those of you who want to use wifi, we suggest to use an USB wifi adapter. Main Issue The main issue is with the Broadcom wifi driver. Mac Mini (late 2009) uses Broadcom wifi chipset and thus we required Broadcom drivers. However, Broadcom drivers are not open sourced. This is in conflict to the open source principal adopted by the Red Hat Community.  In summary, there will be no rpm build for Broadcom drivers. We have to compile and build the package ourselves. We have attempted to compile our driver, but we encounter many dependencies issue. Since there are many Linux distribution that works, we decided not to waste our time on building the driver. Another main issue we encounter is the ethernet driver. Mac Mini uses Nvidia ethernet chip for the network port. The latest version of CentOS has stop supporting these old network drivers. Therefore, Cent...
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Configure Unattended Upgrades on Raspberry Pi

If we were to run Raspberry Pi headless (without attached monitor), it would be nice if we can perform unattended system upgrades. In Debain/Ubuntu class of software, we can perform unattended upgrades using the software package unattended-upgrades.  To install the software, use the command below:  sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades # Following are additional software required # we only need mailutils or bsd-mailx, choose 1 sudo apt-get install mailutils sudo apt-get install bsd-mailx sudo apt-get install update-notifier-common Next, we need to edit the configuration files: sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades The configuration should be similar as below: Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern { // Codename based matching: // This will follow the migration of a release through different // archives (e.g. from testing to stable and later oldstable). // "o=Debian,n=jessie"; // "o=Debian,n=jessie-update...
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