Got given one of those exquisitely made late-2010 Mac Mini that is too old to do any modern computing (read, no modern browser available at all now). MacOS runs with seconds-wait between every mouse click – but fair enough, it is a Core 2 Duo with just 2GB of RAM.
Had good experience with LXLE distro on some older PCs – early i5s with 4GB of RAM – so I thought what’s to lose? Well, it turns out, a few more steps, u-turns and Googling required than the PCs!
Here are the steps:
1. Boot into MacOS Recovery and use Disk Utility
Despite blogs and comments saying pretty much “just boot up the Linux USB and off you go” – it failed consistently every try. A comment on Reddit offered the help needed (sorry, can’t find that post now!)
- Boot up Mac Mini whilst holding the Option key
- Select Recovery drive
- Click on Disk Utility
- Delete existing MacOS partition (yes, this is a clean install, not a dual boot)
- Create new partition and set as FAT
2. Boot into LXLE installation USB without any network
- Boot up Mac Mini whilst holding the Option Key
- Select USB
- Follow the instructions to install LXLE, but DO NOT enable network (having the internet and downloading updated packages invariably hangs the installation)
3. Detective work with GRUB
- Upon reboot once the installation completes, it was rather dejecting to see a GRUB command prompt instead of the usual cursor-based menu.
- https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/classic-sysadmin-how-to-rescue-a-non-booting-grub-2-on-linux came to the rescue
- As outlined in the above article, a bit of detective work is required, but here’s the commands that worked for me:
- grub> ls
- (hd0), (hd1), (hd2), (hd0, gpt2), (hd0 gpt1)
- grub> ls (hd0,gpt2)
- [this is where I found all the typical linux directories like bin/ boot/ etc]
- grub> set root=(hd0,gpt2)
- grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.something-something-generic root=/dev/sda2
- grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.something-something-generic
- grub> boot
- That booted into LXLE after a bit of sweaty waiting and praying!
- Then make sure you run ‘update-grub’ then ‘grub-install /dev/sda’ to make auto-booting permanent.
4. Enable IPv6 at the router
- Not sure why, but whenever I did an ‘sudo apt-get update’ or using the GUI package manager, all the package URLs from ppa.launchpad.net just don’t resolve and therefore fails.
- Tried different ways of fixing this to no avail, until chancing upon an unreferenced comment somewhere that PPA Launchpad won’t resolve IPv4 anymore – which can’t be confirmed anywhere on the actual website (or perhaps I was too frazzle to see it).
- Having exhausted my understanding of the package system and my Googling abilities, I decided to enable IPv6 on my router – hoping that nothing breaks for the rest of the network.
- Luckily, setting ‘IPv6 Connection type’ to [Native] (as I’m on PPPoE for the WAN) on my ASUS router did the trick – nothing (so far) broke on my network and PPA Launchpad served packages now.
- https://www.asus.com/au/support/faq/113990/
5. Update packages – it will take a bit of time as 650MB of data is downloaded and installed.
6. Running Hardware Detect
- Hardware detect identified a Nvidia driver that I can use instead of the generic driver.
- I thought, surely a specific driver would be better – but the fonts on the menu and everywhere in the GUI became MASSIVE.
- Need to adjust DPI
- editing or creating
/usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf/50xserver-command.confand adding the commandxerver-command=X -core -dpi 150 - http://blog.mlindgren.ca/entry/2015/02/21/configuring-dpi-in-lubuntu-slash-lxde/
UPDATE: Unfortuately, LXLE broke after an update. By that I mean, sound no longer works (that is, cannot detect the HDMI audio device, nor the headphone jack), and wifi as well (i.e. no hardware detected).
7. To boot into USB again to try another distro (Antix 23) wasn’t straightforward. The previous installation of grub doesn’t display the grub menu, but goes directly into LXLE. So, to reinstate grub menu, I had to follow various grub modifications like
https://askubuntu.com/questions/16042/how-to-get-to-the-grub-menu-at-boot-time
What worked in the end was setting GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=true
Then pressing ‘c’ to get into the CLI
Then following the advice on https://szymonkrajewski.pl/how-to-boot-system-from-usb-using-grub/ to boot into the Antix 23 live-cd USB drive.
8. Once Antix installed, had to follow Step 3 again to set grub up properly. This time, for some reason, the grub menu comes up automatically – rather than as before where it boot straight to LXLE.
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