Install Mint 18.3 on old Macbook

[wombatologist]

Just for general info, in case anyone else has been struggling to get Linux working on an old Macbook, here's what worked for me almost by accident.

Firstly, I installed Mint Cinnamon 18.3 64 bit on a new SSD in an old ACER laptop someone gave me. The ACER was a terrible HOS, so on a whim, I took the old drive out of my ancient 2006 Macbook 2,1 (people keep giving me old laptops - is it my nose?) and the new one out of the ACER and swapped them around. Linux Mint fired up straight away with no problems on the Macbook and has continued to do so for the last couple of days. I even still get the old Mac chime! This Macbook as default only ran 32 bit software but "theoretically" could run 64 bit. Well, I didn't have to do any tweaking at all. It runs Linux 64 bit and runs beautifully with only 3Gb RAM and a 2Ghz core 2 CPU. Battery life is about the same as I was getting under Snow Leopard - about 3.30hrs. YouTube runs smoothly and mostly the fan remains off.

As for the ACER, I'd previously installed Xubuntu 32 bit on a separate partition on the Mac drive, which is all it would run, using rEFit and dual booting Snow Leopard. I stuffed that drive into the ACER, which found the Linux partition and now runs Xubuntu!

By the way, the ACER had a UEFI BIOS. I really wasn't expecting any response when I stuck the SSD in the Mac, but it just accepted it and ran straight away. If you have one of those old Macbooks, which are really a pleasant machine to use, give it a go.

[Pierre]

Good Stuff,

it's always nice to have a win with those oldies