It looks so far like Mint (a Linux distribution) is working on my 2006 MacBook — one of them old white plastic models. I wiped out the entire disk, so there’s no Mac left except what Apple burned into the hardware. As far as I can tell, everything is working, from audio, to trackpad, to wifi.

Here’s how I did it: I tried everything.

Unfortunately, I can’t quite remember what worked, except that I used Mac Linux USB Loader to create the USB stick from which I booted the Mac into Linux. I also used Iso 2 USB EFI Booter to get the Mac to boot into Linux, although I’m not sure I actually needed that since I wasn’t going for a dual boot.

But I do know that the thing that put me over the top were some commands listed in a comment on a page about how to manually install a bootloader. I was there because after I eventually got Linux installed, it still wouldn’t boot. The article on that page was helpful but I was stilling getting the weird-ass “canonical cow” error message when trying to install grub (the standard Linux bootloader) — you’ll know that error message when you see it. But the commands in the comment at the end by Zigilin got it working:

instead of running grub-install, run cmd below:

mount –bind /proc /mnt/proc

mount –bind /dev /mnt/dev

mount –bind /sys /mnt/sys

chroot /mnt

grub-install /sd#

update-grub

(Replace the # in sd# with the letter of the partition you installed the Linux into. Better: read the article.)

After you get it working, you might want to check this post about how to add some finishing touches.

Thank you, kind Internet strangers!

Categories: tech dw