David Herron .com

I have a Mac Mini and have had some problems getting Leopard to run on it.. and decided to try installing Linux to experiment with what might be the problem. Under Leopard the screen often goes 'weird' and the system stops responding. It's not clear what's going on there. I tried updating the system to 10.5.2 and it refused to properly update.

The first question was -- is there anything special to do to install Linux on this machine? The Mini, like all Mac's, use EFI rather than the normal firmware used in PC's so would that cause an issue with Linux?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mac_mini - This is the official Ubuntu documentation page on this. It talks about a dual partition using BootCamp to select Mac OS X and Ubuntu at boot time. However in my case Leopard doesn't work and I wanted to install ONLY an Ubuntu system.

http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/HOWTO_Install_Debian_on_the_Intel_Mac_Mini - This says starting with kernel 2.6.15 or later Linux started to have support for Mac hardware. The page goes on to discuss refit, http://refit.sourceforge.net/ -- this is a widget which requires a Mac OS X partition and does something special to allow boot into Linux via the Mac OS X partition. I found several other pages suggesting that refit was required. Such as http://sowerbutts.com/linux-mac-mini/

BTW http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page is a site for jointly working on this general problem, it has linux distro specific pages and http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/AppleTV specifically covers efforts to make an AppleTV into a Linux machine.

http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Dual_Booting - http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Triple_Booting - Those cover various boot options.

http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=211 - is the UbuntuForums section for Apple Intel

In my case I want to run only Linux, specifically Ubuntu.

Fortunately reading the UbuntuForums I started to get the impression it would work if I just installed it. So that's what I did. I downloaded the Hardy Heron beta which was released a couple days ago, burned it to a CD, and booted the Mini off the CD. The LiveCD installer came right up, I installed it, and now have a working Ubuntu system. It works great.

A problem is that if I turn on the wacko screen effects -- that is, go into System / Preferences / Appearance and going to the Visual Effects tab -- that preference pane turns on the use of Compiz to add extra graphics effects. If I turn that on then the system crashes frequently. I currently have this set to None, for no special effects, and am not having crashes. But on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mac_mini it says the mini has "one of the best 3D cards around for the Linux world" and goes on to give some instructions.