TechnoZeal

This is the last installation for old Mac Mini (late 2009). The last Linux distribution we tested is Zorin. Zorin works fine, however, we encounter some bluetooth redirection issue and intermittent Wifi connection issue. Preparing USB Drive Since Zorin is based on Ubuntu and Debian, we can prepare the USB drive using the Ubuntu USB drive tutorial here . Installation of Zorin Fir we bootup the USB drive using the option key (alt key). Then we will be asked to try or install Zorin. Select Try Zorin . The Zorin desktop will appear as follows: You can try testing with Zorin to see if it fits your taste. to install Zorin, click on the app icon at the top left corner of the desktop. The welcome screen will appear as above. Click Continue . Click both option on the screen above to install Zorin and update at the same time. Click Continue when done. On the screen above, we are asked to confirm if we want to wipe the disk for fresh i...

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...

To setup a network device on Ubuntu server 18.04, we need to use new network setup application netplan. Netplan allow us to configure new network adapter. We encounter network setup issue when we need to add a second network adapter in VirtualBox for networking with host. Using Ip Link Before we use netplan, we can use the following command to show all device:  ip link show To temporary enable the device we can use the command below: (please replace eth0 with the network device that you want to configure): sudo ip link set eth0 up Use the following command to enable dhcp client. sudo dhclient eth0 Using Netplan To enable the network adapter permanently, we need to configure netplan. Use the following command to open the configuration file: sudo nano /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml On the configuration file, we add additional network device as follows. Please note that enp0s2 is the current default device and enp0s4 is the new device. Please also mak...

RealVNC is a commercial company that sell VNC license for the enterprise market. However, the company allow home user to setup VNC server for personal use. The limitation is that you are only allow 5 connection. User must register an ID with the company. The configuration of your VNC will be stored on the company's server. Since RealVNC is professionally produce, it is much better compare to the open source product in Linux. The main advantage is easy configuration although there are steps to install and start the server especially on Linux platform. We do not need to worry about ip address and port number. What the server and client required is our RealVNC ID which we have created. Unlike the default Vino server that comes with Ubuntu, RealVNC will start without user login. The system is created with security in mind. Encryption is done transparently without any intervention from user. We will be showing a simple guide on how to install and Configure RealVNC Connect (serv...

Ubuntu already has a VNC server Vino  pre-installed. So no additional VNC server installation is required. Configuring VNC Server To share screen from Ubuntu, we need to perform a few steps: To share screen go to Settings > Sharing Turn ON the OFF button on the top right corner Click on Screen Sharing . Turn ON the OFF button on the top left corner and set a password. Resulting screen is as follows: Once it is completed. We need additional command line to configure so that it works. Apparently, the default encryption does not work well will any VNC client. To get VNC to accept incoming connection, open a terminal and execute the following command: gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption false Once this setting is done, we have one more step to do before we are good to go.  We need to enable auto-login so that screen sharing can work. Go to Settings > Details > Users On the top right corner, click Unlock and enter your...

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...