Trisquel on a iMac?
I am a member!
Has anybody here tried to install Trisquel on a iMac? Is it even possible? (alu - intel 2008)
Surely there's a way. The easiest way is to download it and try it out. The Live CD/DVD/USB image can be run without making any changes to see how things work.
Trisquel 6 works, Trisquel 7 still doesn't due to an issue with the Grub installer, you can run it via a Live instance however. That said T6 still works incredibly well on these Apple system, the only exceptions is the wireless generally in not supported due to Broadcom not providing many (if any) Free drivers. Also if there is a specific 3D card that isn't supported it will drop back to the 2D renderer.
Personally I have had much better success with the USB images rather than the CD/DVD but that could just be an issue with my machine.
I am a member!
Tx for feedback.
Will try the live cd first. I'm in no need for the WiFi to work as it is connect with wire and 3D i don't do anyway. It's mostly used for design (paper print - will try to replace InDesign with Scribus - which I think will be a hard learning curve), some development and the usual internet stuff.
I am a member!
Just to let you know. Trisquel on my iMac (2008) works great!
After trying the live cd properly I decided to wipe osx and install Trisquel on the HD. After two weeks ...so far so good.... Tx to the developers/maintainers of Debian/Ubuntu and Trisquel.
----
trisquel-imac
description: Computer
width: 64 bits
capabilities: vsyscall32
*-core
description: Motherboard
physical id: 0
*-memory
description: System memory
physical id: 0
size: 3936MiB
*-cpu
product: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8435 @ 3.06GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 1
bus info: cpu@0
size: 800MHz
capacity: 800MHz
width: 64 bits
That's really cool man!. Please keep in touch and share your experience with the comunity if you find any issue.
Hey, I have an iMac Late 2009. 64 bits Core 2 Duo processor 3,06 GHz, 4 GB of RAM. I try to boot Trisquel 7 from both a CD (with the Mini edition) and an USB (with the standard edition), and neither work, with either Apple EFI or rEFInd. The CD is ejected every time I load it, and only a BIOS boot is detected on the USB drive, which does NOT load the Trisquel GRUB and instead tries to boot from the hard disk drive.
May anybody help me, please? :S
Do these wiki pages help?
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/burn-trisquel-cd-images
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/how-create-liveusb
Both my CD and USB boot from another PC. C'mon, I used dd for the "pen-drive"! xD
I already know how to burn bootable devices, I've been doing it for years. Thank you anyway, but this seems a problem with the boot sector. And maybe the CD itself or the Superdrive, with the optical media boot.
If what @jabjabs says earlier in the thread is still true there's a known problem with T7. Try T6.
And now I'm using a real keyboard...
If you want to run the risk that it might be that all you can do is
see how pretty T7 is by booting the LiveCD then:
In the past (around the vintage of your machine) I found iMac optical
drives finickier than many others. So after md5sum or gpg --verify
-ing your image again (maybe there's a one bit error which only
matters to Macs) then try burning at a slower speed (say 24x CD, 4 x DVD) on a
different machine. CD-R is better than DVD+/-R when such things are a
problem. So yet again you might be stuck with T6.
Depending on what Mac boot firmware is/has been like you might
alternatively try a USB Disk Creator made USB stick as AIUI that uses
a different boot loader. But the outdated Ubuntu advice is to use
optical media.
1) The CD suddendly worked! But it asks for username and password. I tried "trisquel", "trisquel-mini" and "root" (with no password or repeating the username), and nothing works. Anybody knows what could it be? (and no, I'm not using an AMD graphics card)
2) If the CD fails again, I should try to create again the USB. So, could you recommend me an app? UNetbootin, for example?
Try the username "live" (and is there a guest session? Perhaps you should try "guest" as well....)
Anyway Unetbootin should work. I don't think Apple computers support booting from USB, though (or was that Macbooks?). In which case you need a CD that can boot the USB drive. I'd reccommend you plop (look for it on the net) but I think it's non-free (the licence prohibits selling (or commercial purposes?), I think). Yet at the same time I can't quite find an alternative to it :(
Oh, and there's netinstall! (Not the easiest but it works).
And you can also debootstrap ( https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap ) from a Live CD that does work better for you (preferably if not mandatorily on a Debian based distro), but that'd require a bit of learning (most of which having to do with what one does after the debootstrap considering what a barebones system it installs). If you'd like to try though, I'd post a thing or 2 about it and it might help despite my far-from-infinite knowledge.
None of both users worked, duh -_-
My iMac supports USB booting (only UEFI on Apple's EFI, also BIOS with rEFInd), so in theory, it should just work (as Trisquel 7 also has an UEFI boot manager). However, I couldn't start from my USB, after burning it using dd, as said earlier. So yeah, maybe debootstrap. I have little experience with the Debian installer disk tools, so if that could work... :P
Oh, and note: If you want to do a debootstrap there's a trisquel-mini metapackage for you to install when you chroot into the installation.
Not that I ever install it like that (I always install something like trisquel-base>Xorg>Lxterminal>Synaptic>Desktop
Shell&Network Manager&Upower&DM>other apps)
I haven't tried the release version of T7 yet actually, I shall do that in the next few days. I also had issues with the previous image of T7 (Around about October date) on a Intel Core 2 desktop with it not being able to write to boot sector on 0,0,0 but that has been resolved with the official release, so there is hope for the iMac as well. :)
Doing good, doing good. Installing right now, as I finally managed to boot (still can't confirm that the problem's over)
The Ubuntu USB Creator did the job - thank you all for your help! :D
