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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.
One can get sound to work on the Mac Mini. There is a post from a guy getting it to work on Ubuntuforums.
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http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1274
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.