Installing Linux on an old 2008 MacBook needs some workarounds & fixes
I just finished doing up an old white MacBook from 2008 (note: not MacBook Pro) for Jana's best friend, back in Brno.
I hit quite a few glitches along the way. Partly for my own memory, partly in case anyone else hits them, here are the work-arounds I needed...
BTW, I have left the links visible and in the text so you can see where you're going. This is intentional.
Picking a distribution and desktop
As the machine is maxed out with 4GB of RAM, and only has a fairly feeble Intel HD 3100 GPU, I went for Xfce as a lightweight desktop that's very configurable and doesn't need hardware OpenGL. (I just wish Xfce had the GNOME 2/Maté facility to lock controls and panels into place.)
Xubuntu (18.10, later upgraded to 19.04) had two peculiar and annoying errors.
By the way: there are "hacks" to install newer versions of macOS onto older Macs which no longer support them. Colin "dosdude1" Mistr has a good list, here: http://dosdude1.com/software.html
However quite a few of these have serious drawbacks on a machine this old. For instance, my 2008 MB might be able to run Mountain Lion (10.8) but probably nothing newer, and if it did, I would have no graphics acceleration, making the machine slow and maybe unstable. Similarly, my 2011 Mac Mini maxes out at High Sierra. Mojave (10.14) and Catalina (10.15) apparently work well, but Big Sur (11) again has no graphics acceleration and is thus well-nigh unusable. But if you have a newer machine and the reports are that it works well as a hack, this may make it useful again.
I had to reinstall Lion. Due to this, I found that the MacBook will not boot Lion off USB; I had to burn a DVD-R. This worked perfectly first time. There are some instructions here:
https://www.lifewire.com/install-os-x-lion-using-bootable-dvd-2260333
Beware, retail Mac OS X DVDs are dual-layer. If the image is more than 5GB, it may not fit on an ordinary single-layer DVD-R.
If I remember correctly, Lion was the last version of Mac OS X that was not a free download. However, that was 10 years and 8 versions ago, so I hope Apple will forgive me helping you to pirate it. A Bittorrent can be found here.
Incidentally, a vaguely-current browser for Lion is ParrotGeeks Firefox Legacy. I found this made the machine much more useful with Lion, able to access Facebook, Gmail etc. absolutely fine, which the bundled version of Safari cannot do. If you disable all sharing options in OS X and only use Firefox, the machine should be reasonably secure even today. OS X is immune to all Windows malware. Download Firefox Legacy from here:
https://parrotgeek.com/fxlegacy.html
However, saying all that, Linux Mint does not suffer from either of these Xubuntu issues, so I recommend Linux Mint Xfce. I found Mint 20 worked well and the upgrade to Mint 20.1 was quick and seamless.
Installation
If you make a 2nd partition in Disk Utility while you're (re-)installing Mac OS X, you can just reformat that as ext4 in the Linux setup program. This saves messing around with Linux disk partitioning on a UEFI MacBook, which I am warning you is not like doing it on a PC. (I accidentally corrupted the MacBook's hard disk trying to copy a Linux partition onto it with gparted, then remove it using fdisk. That's why I had to reinstall. Again, I strongly recommend doing any partitioning with Mac OS X's Disk Utility, and not with Linux.) All Intel Macs have UEFI, not a BIOS, and so they all use only GPT partitioning, not MBR.
I set aside 48GB for Lion and all the rest for Mint. (Mint defaults to using a swapfile in the root partition, just like Ubuntu. This means that 2 partitions are enough. I was trying to keep things as simple as possible.)
If you use Linux fdisk, or Gparted, to look at the disk from Linux, remember to leave the original Apple EFI System Partition ("ESP") alone and intact. You need that even if you single-boot Linux and nothing else.
Wifi doesn't work out of the box on Mint. You need to connect to the Internet via Ethernet, then open the Software and Drivers settings program and install the Broadcom drivers. That was enough for me; more info is here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wireless-drivers
While connected with a cable, I also did a full update:
sudo -s
apt update
apt full-upgrade -y
apt autoremove -y
apt purge
apt clean
Glitches and gotchas
Startup or shutdown can take ages, or freeze the machine entirely, hanging during shutdown. The fan may spin up during this. The fix is an simple edit to add an extra kernel parameter to GRUB, described here:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=284960
(Aside: hoping to work around this, I installed kexec-tools for faster reboots. It didn't work. I don't know why not. Perhaps it's something to do with the machine using UEFI, not a BIOS. I also installed the Ubuntu Hardware Enablement stack with its newer kernel, in case that helped, but it didn't. It didn't seem to cause any problems, though, so I left it.)
GRUB shows an error about not being able to find a Mok file, then continues because SecureBoot is disabled. This is non-fatal but there is a fix here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1279602/ubuntu-20-04-failed-to-set-moklistrt-invalid-parameter
While troubleshooting the Mok error above, I found that the previous owner of this machine had Fedora on it at some point, and even though I removed and completely reinstalled OS X Lion in a new partition, the UEFI boot entry for Fedora was still there and was still the default. I removed it using the instructions here:
https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/how-to-use-linux-efibootmgr-examples
NOTE: I suggest you don't set a boot sequence. Just set the ubuntu entry as the default and leave it at that. The Apple firmware very briefly displays a no-bootable-volume icon (a folder with a question mark on it) as it boots. I think this is why, when I used efibootmgr to set Mint as the default then OS X, it never loaded GRUB but went straight into OS X.
(Mint have not renamed their UEFI bootloader; it's still called "ubuntu" from the upstream distro. I believe this means that you cannot dual-boot a UEFI machine with both Ubuntu and Mint, or multiple versions of either. This reflects my general impression that UEFI is a pain in the neck.)
The Apple built-in iSight Webcam requires a firmware file to work under Linux, which you must extract from Mac OS X:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleiSight
Both Xubuntu and Mint automatically install entries in the GRUB boot menu for Mac OS X. For Lion, there are 2: one for the 32-bit kernel, one for the 64-bit kernel. These will not work. To boot into macOS, hold down the Opt key as the machine powers on; this will display the firmware's graphical boot-device selection screen. The Linux partition is described as "EFI Boot". Click on "macOS" or whatever you called your Mac HD partition. If you want to boot into Linux, just power-cycle it and then leave it alone - the screen goes grey, then black with a flashing cursor, then the GRUB menu appears and you can pick Linux. The Linux partition is not visible from macOS and you can't pick it in the Startup Disk system preference-pane.
Post-install fine-tuning
I also added the ubuntu-restricted-extras package to get some nicer web fonts, a few handy codecs, and so on. Remember when installing this that you must use the cursor keys and Enter/Return to say "yes" to the Microsoft free licence agreement. The mouse won't work - use your keyboard. I also added Apple HFS support, so that Linux can easily manipulate the Mac OS X partition.
I installed Google Chrome and Skype, direct from their vendors' download pages. Both of these add their own repositories to the system, so they will automatically update when the OS does. I also installed Zoom, which does not have a repo and so won't get updated. This is an annoyance; we'll have to look at that later if it becomes problematic. I also added VLC because the machine has a DVD drive and this is an easy way to play CDs and DVDs.
As this machine and the old Thinkpad I am sending along with it are intended for kids to use, I installed the educational packages from UbuntuEd. I added those that are recommended for pre-school, primary and secondary schoolchildren, as listed here:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-education-ubuntued/17063
I enabled unattended-upgrades (and set the machine to install updates at shutdown) as described here:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/set-up-automatic-unattended-updates-for-ubuntu-20-04/
While testing the webcam, I discovered that Mint doesn't include Cheese, so I installed that, too:
sudo apt install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras hfsprogs vlc cheese
I hit quite a few glitches along the way. Partly for my own memory, partly in case anyone else hits them, here are the work-arounds I needed...
BTW, I have left the links visible and in the text so you can see where you're going. This is intentional.
Picking a distribution and desktop
As the machine is maxed out with 4GB of RAM, and only has a fairly feeble Intel HD 3100 GPU, I went for Xfce as a lightweight desktop that's very configurable and doesn't need hardware OpenGL. (I just wish Xfce had the GNOME 2/Maté facility to lock controls and panels into place.)
Xubuntu (18.10, later upgraded to 19.04) had two peculiar and annoying errors.
- On boot, NumLock is always on. This is a serious snag because a MacBook has no NumLock key, nor a NumLock indicator to tell you, and thus no easy way to turn it off. (Fn+F6 twice worked on Xubuntu 18/19, but not on 20.04.) I found a workaround: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppleKeyboard#Numlock_on_Apple_Wireless_Keyboard
- Secondly, Xubuntu sometimes could not bring the wifi connection up. Rebooting into Mac OS X and then warm-booting into Xubuntu fixed this.
By the way: there are "hacks" to install newer versions of macOS onto older Macs which no longer support them. Colin "dosdude1" Mistr has a good list, here: http://dosdude1.com/software.html
However quite a few of these have serious drawbacks on a machine this old. For instance, my 2008 MB might be able to run Mountain Lion (10.8) but probably nothing newer, and if it did, I would have no graphics acceleration, making the machine slow and maybe unstable. Similarly, my 2011 Mac Mini maxes out at High Sierra. Mojave (10.14) and Catalina (10.15) apparently work well, but Big Sur (11) again has no graphics acceleration and is thus well-nigh unusable. But if you have a newer machine and the reports are that it works well as a hack, this may make it useful again.
I had to reinstall Lion. Due to this, I found that the MacBook will not boot Lion off USB; I had to burn a DVD-R. This worked perfectly first time. There are some instructions here:
https://www.lifewire.com/install-os-x-lion-using-bootable-dvd-2260333
Beware, retail Mac OS X DVDs are dual-layer. If the image is more than 5GB, it may not fit on an ordinary single-layer DVD-R.
If I remember correctly, Lion was the last version of Mac OS X that was not a free download. However, that was 10 years and 8 versions ago, so I hope Apple will forgive me helping you to pirate it. A Bittorrent can be found here.
Incidentally, a vaguely-current browser for Lion is ParrotGeeks Firefox Legacy. I found this made the machine much more useful with Lion, able to access Facebook, Gmail etc. absolutely fine, which the bundled version of Safari cannot do. If you disable all sharing options in OS X and only use Firefox, the machine should be reasonably secure even today. OS X is immune to all Windows malware. Download Firefox Legacy from here:
https://parrotgeek.com/fxlegacy.html
However, saying all that, Linux Mint does not suffer from either of these Xubuntu issues, so I recommend Linux Mint Xfce. I found Mint 20 worked well and the upgrade to Mint 20.1 was quick and seamless.
Installation
If you make a 2nd partition in Disk Utility while you're (re-)installing Mac OS X, you can just reformat that as ext4 in the Linux setup program. This saves messing around with Linux disk partitioning on a UEFI MacBook, which I am warning you is not like doing it on a PC. (I accidentally corrupted the MacBook's hard disk trying to copy a Linux partition onto it with gparted, then remove it using fdisk. That's why I had to reinstall. Again, I strongly recommend doing any partitioning with Mac OS X's Disk Utility, and not with Linux.) All Intel Macs have UEFI, not a BIOS, and so they all use only GPT partitioning, not MBR.
I set aside 48GB for Lion and all the rest for Mint. (Mint defaults to using a swapfile in the root partition, just like Ubuntu. This means that 2 partitions are enough. I was trying to keep things as simple as possible.)
If you use Linux fdisk, or Gparted, to look at the disk from Linux, remember to leave the original Apple EFI System Partition ("ESP") alone and intact. You need that even if you single-boot Linux and nothing else.
Wifi doesn't work out of the box on Mint. You need to connect to the Internet via Ethernet, then open the Software and Drivers settings program and install the Broadcom drivers. That was enough for me; more info is here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/installing-broadcom-wireless-drivers
While connected with a cable, I also did a full update:
sudo -s
apt update
apt full-upgrade -y
apt autoremove -y
apt purge
apt clean
Glitches and gotchas
Startup or shutdown can take ages, or freeze the machine entirely, hanging during shutdown. The fan may spin up during this. The fix is an simple edit to add an extra kernel parameter to GRUB, described here:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=284960
(Aside: hoping to work around this, I installed kexec-tools for faster reboots. It didn't work. I don't know why not. Perhaps it's something to do with the machine using UEFI, not a BIOS. I also installed the Ubuntu Hardware Enablement stack with its newer kernel, in case that helped, but it didn't. It didn't seem to cause any problems, though, so I left it.)
GRUB shows an error about not being able to find a Mok file, then continues because SecureBoot is disabled. This is non-fatal but there is a fix here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1279602/ubuntu-20-04-failed-to-set-moklistrt-invalid-parameter
While troubleshooting the Mok error above, I found that the previous owner of this machine had Fedora on it at some point, and even though I removed and completely reinstalled OS X Lion in a new partition, the UEFI boot entry for Fedora was still there and was still the default. I removed it using the instructions here:
https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/how-to-use-linux-efibootmgr-examples
NOTE: I suggest you don't set a boot sequence. Just set the ubuntu entry as the default and leave it at that. The Apple firmware very briefly displays a no-bootable-volume icon (a folder with a question mark on it) as it boots. I think this is why, when I used efibootmgr to set Mint as the default then OS X, it never loaded GRUB but went straight into OS X.
(Mint have not renamed their UEFI bootloader; it's still called "ubuntu" from the upstream distro. I believe this means that you cannot dual-boot a UEFI machine with both Ubuntu and Mint, or multiple versions of either. This reflects my general impression that UEFI is a pain in the neck.)
The Apple built-in iSight Webcam requires a firmware file to work under Linux, which you must extract from Mac OS X:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleiSight
Both Xubuntu and Mint automatically install entries in the GRUB boot menu for Mac OS X. For Lion, there are 2: one for the 32-bit kernel, one for the 64-bit kernel. These will not work. To boot into macOS, hold down the Opt key as the machine powers on; this will display the firmware's graphical boot-device selection screen. The Linux partition is described as "EFI Boot". Click on "macOS" or whatever you called your Mac HD partition. If you want to boot into Linux, just power-cycle it and then leave it alone - the screen goes grey, then black with a flashing cursor, then the GRUB menu appears and you can pick Linux. The Linux partition is not visible from macOS and you can't pick it in the Startup Disk system preference-pane.
Post-install fine-tuning
I also added the ubuntu-restricted-extras package to get some nicer web fonts, a few handy codecs, and so on. Remember when installing this that you must use the cursor keys and Enter/Return to say "yes" to the Microsoft free licence agreement. The mouse won't work - use your keyboard. I also added Apple HFS support, so that Linux can easily manipulate the Mac OS X partition.
I installed Google Chrome and Skype, direct from their vendors' download pages. Both of these add their own repositories to the system, so they will automatically update when the OS does. I also installed Zoom, which does not have a repo and so won't get updated. This is an annoyance; we'll have to look at that later if it becomes problematic. I also added VLC because the machine has a DVD drive and this is an easy way to play CDs and DVDs.
As this machine and the old Thinkpad I am sending along with it are intended for kids to use, I installed the educational packages from UbuntuEd. I added those that are recommended for pre-school, primary and secondary schoolchildren, as listed here:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-education-ubuntued/17063
I enabled unattended-upgrades (and set the machine to install updates at shutdown) as described here:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/set-up-automatic-unattended-updates-for-ubuntu-20-04/
While testing the webcam, I discovered that Mint doesn't include Cheese, so I installed that, too:
sudo apt install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras hfsprogs vlc cheese