TechnoZeal

We started out to install various Linux distribution on our old Mac Mini (late 2009). We have tried many Linux distribution. Most of the Linux distribution installed without any major issue. However, there are issue and problems to be solved along the way. Conclusion The most successful distributions are Debian/Ubuntu class of Linux. You can installed Fedora or CentOS if you are willing to give up the wifi capabilities. Alternatively, you can install the latest Wifi-USB adapter or if you have the time, you can attempt to build the Broadcom driver from scratch. This is due to the lack of drivers. We have issue with Arch Linux distributions on Mac Mini. It hangs frequently. We don't think it is hardware issue since other distributions works fine. We have tried many Debian/Ubuntu class of Linux distribution. Debian, MX Linux and Elementary OS are the most successful installation. Ubuntu and Linux Mint have intermittent wifi connection issue. Rela...

This is part of the series on reviving old Mac Mini (late 2009). So far this is the best user experience we have on the Mac Mini. We have tried Linux Mint previously and it gave us very little problem except the Wifi connects intermittently. For elementary OS, the wifi driver works well with the OS. We have a little problem with Bluetooth audio but there is work around available. As far as user experience is concern, this is the most Mac liked OS. Introducing Elementary OS Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu. The main feature for this distro is the Pantheon desktop environment. This is the most Mac liked OS. Preparing for Installation First proceed to the website  https://elementary.io/ and download the iso image. To burn the image to USB, use the open source software, Etcher . You can follow this tutorial on creating USB drive for Ubuntu.  The concept is the same, we just need to replace elementary OS image with Ubuntu image. Booting up the Mac Mini...

This is a basic guide to install Fedora 28 on Mac Mini (late 2009) version.  This version is quite unstable as we received message that our boot image crash. Despite the error message, we manage to get Fedora to work.  Preparing to Install Fedora 28 To prepare a Fedora USB drive, we can download the Fedora Media Writer App. Using this app, we can download Fedora and burn the image to the USB drive directly. Installing Fedora 28 Bootup from USB using option (Alt) key. Then select Try Fedora 28 . Once the live image is booted, we can use the disk app to remove any partition that we want to get rid of. Alternatively, we can do that during installation. Click and run the installation app to install Fedora. The welcome screen is as follows:   Select the appropriate language, click Continue . You will be presented with something similar to the following screen, except that the disk was not defined. We can change the time zone and keyboard if we ...

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...