- INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI HOW TO
- INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI 64 BIT
- INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI MANUAL
- INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI UPGRADE
Found basically three things of note.ġ) What is important is the GPT partition table for the flash drive. I can't currently add this as a comment to Spades solution so it's posted as another answer.Īnyways, I was seeking a pure Ubuntu implementation as I only use Ubuntu.
INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI HOW TO
You can also install mbpfan, which will sort of make your fans work on the Mac Mini (I still need to figure out how to get it to run at startup). freeze less).Īlso, it looks like JWongDev made a pretty good adaptation/improvement on my answer, It allows your new Ubuntu machine to run much faster (i.e. I didn't come across any of the issues involving GRUB being broken or not installed or anything, so it was just a clean install and use for me.Ī recommendation: As soon as you can, ditch GNOME desktop for Xfce. Then, when the GRUB screen comes up, select "Install Ubuntu". When the rEFInd screen comes up, select the fallback bootloader (boot manager? I don't remember) on the flash drive you plugged in. Go and plug the flash drive into your Mac Mini, and restart it.
INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI 64 BIT
So, we need this file to let the Mac Mini do a 32 bit EFI boot of the 64 bit Ubuntu ISO. I modified what it said to do and it worked perfectly, but do go ahead and check it for yourself if what I'm suggesting doesn't work.) The reason we need this file is that the Mac Mini 2,1 is a 64 bit system that won't do 64 bit EFI boots. (This step came after reading this very helpful article on the Ubuntu forums. I'd assume you could use UUI or Etcher, but I didn't test them.ĭownload this file and put it in the /EFI/BOOT/ directory on your newly burned flash drive. Use Rufus to burn the Ubuntu 18.04.3 64-bit ISO ( download link) onto a drive, making sure to use the GPT format, not the MBR format, and have the drive formatted to FAT32, not NTFS. Get rEFInd working on your Mac Mini (This might not be strictly necessary, but I used it and it worked and I'm not reinstalling OS X and trying again without it). Well, the ones that made forward progress, anyway. Hope this helps the three other people doing this within the next ten years. This took me three days of pain and agony and searching to find out how to do it. Okay, here's an answer from 2018, that actually works (I did it on a 2,1 Mac Mini Late 2007). Here is a link to the actual manual: Mac mini (Mid 2007) Service Manual.
INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI MANUAL
If interested, a service manual can be found at this site.
INSTALLING UBUNTU ON A MAC MINI UPGRADE
This would be an upgrade to your existing optical drive. A factory refurbished Apple SuperDrive 8x DVD Burner Drive can be purchased for $8.75. To install Ubuntu using a DVD, you would have to repair your optical drive. Actually, the instructions can be found at Boot camp install of Windows 7 issue, no bootable devices.
This option is "off topic" and it would be better to ask at the site Ask Different. This would require installing a free copy of VirtualBox on OS X. Without a working optical drive, you could still install Windows. Making a USB bootable recover disk assistant will allow you to reload OS X Lion from Apple's web site. If you do, try to see if you can boot to it. If you have Lion installed, did you make a bootable USB flash drive using the OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0? If not, then does your mac still have its hidden recovery system partition? You can determine this by holding down the option key at startup. I did successfully install Ubuntu to an external disk using the DVD. The DVD verified OK, but the flash drive listed an error in 1 file.
I used instructions posted here to create the flash drive. I was able to boot ubuntu-14.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso from a DVD and USB flash drive.