TechnoZeal

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...

This post is part of a series of installation guide to install Linux on Mac Mini (late 2009) version.  For other Linux distribution, please refer to the list at the bottom of this post. Video and Wifi Driver As we have mention in the main post , the video and wifi driver will be our main stumbling block. Based on our experience testing with various distribution, same driver can behave differently in different distribution. For Linux Mint, we find that third party driver will cause us more problem. The recommended Broadcom BCM4321 wifi driver does not work at all. We need to install another driver. If we install Nvidia display driver, the windows will not launch if we boot the system with monitor attached. The best solution is use the default nouveau video driver. Preparing USB Boot Drive Preparing USB boot drive is quite straight forward. Please be aware that for Linux Mint 19, there are problem with the original installation image (linuxmint-19-cinnamon-64bit). The ...