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How to Install Debian on Mac mini
wikinerd writes "After the hype about Mac mini, a Linux consultant wrote a detailed guide on how to install Debian on Mac mini. The whole procedure takes about an hour, but you will need to erase the hard disk and learn to live without the AirPort Extreme, since it's unsupported. The guide also explains how you can dual-boot with Mac OS X and Debian and gives you ideas on how to set up your partitions."
The people at Ubuntu start with Debian and package it for end users. I have Ubuntu on 2 of my 3 Macs (but both are dual boot) and except for having to install IBM's PowerPC Java SDK, it was just about ready to go.
Why run Linux on a Mac? I find that Linux has less to distract me from work. I like to boot OS X to edit video, etc., but for writing (OpenOffice.org) and programming (Eclipse for Java, Python, and C++) there is less fluff on Linux to distract me from my work.
i'd rather have a crappy OSS desktop than a propietary one.
you and four other people.
most of us will use the best tool for the job. that is why i use os x AND darwinports. i get the best of both worlds. until iphoto, itunes, and imovie have comprable equivalents on linux then it's a moot point. for me, i need java, perl, mysql, php, and python. hmmm...already there. X11. there. the only real reason i'd need to run lunux is if i was doing kernel development or something x86 specific. and i don't.
and by the way, i have linux installed on my pc at home. i've run linux since 1998 (red hat 5.2). my "switch" if you will came a couple of years ago when i needed a new laptop and didn't want to pay the ms tax and hardware compatibility was less than perfect for linux on laptops, though it is better now. plus, i have three children and lots of digital movies.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
One can get sound to work on the Mac Mini. There is a post from a guy getting it to work on Ubuntuforums.
8
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1274
Wow, bad wireless support in a Linux Distro? What next? No major vendor games?
Wireless support in linux distros is actually quite good these days.
I'm on an older pismo powerbook that dual boots osx and ydl. I plugged in a dlink 802.11b card and osx didn't see it at all. I ended up paying for a $40 aerocard driver. (There is an opensource driver but it doesn't support wep or wpa for 90% of the cards). Linux did see it and prompted me for the wep key etc.
Then a year later I got an airport card from work. I plugged it in, and removed the dlink card. OSX made me reconfigure the card, including plugging in my wep key again. Linux asked me if I wanted to migrate my wireless settings over to the new airport. It required 0 setup and "just worked".
I bought a Mac mini the day it came out because it was the lowest price for a OS X dongle I've seen, and I needed something quiet. The old fanless G3/450 iMac is the loudest machine in the house because it has one of those Maxtor drives that goes "weerrrerrrowwwwwwEEEERERROOWrrrrreeeoor".
I installed dual-boot Debian testing the day I got the mini, however. (debian-ppc lost my success report mail from weeks ago, so I can't cite precedence over this guy.)
Why install Linux on an OS X dongle?
Because it's probably the cheapest new non-x86 machine you can buy. I care about the portability of my software to other architectures, and I can check them on the mini. Also, it's big-endian.
At some point I'm going to buy a nice Athlon 64 box and run it in pure AMD64 mode. That will give me a sizeof(void *) != sizeof(int) box, and mostly a non-i386 machine. (It's still little-endian, though.) Between the mini and the Athlon 64, I figure I've covered most of the common portability problems, without spending too much money on hardware I can't use for something else like OS X or Halflife 2.