Installing Ubuntu on an old Macbook
[Update: This post is turning into a lab notebook more than anything, and I’m mainly just recording it here as someplace convenient, with the idea that someone might find it useful someday.]
I have a 2008-vintage Macbook for which OS X no longer seems to be a good option: I managed to get it upgraded to OS X 10.7 (which was not straightforward), but I think the hardware is a little underpowered at this point. In fact, upgrades to later versions of OS X are not even supported.
Since I don’t otherwise have a personal laptop and occasionally need something for writing/email/lightweight development, I figured I’d give Linux a shot, having had previous experience of getting extended service lifetime out of old hardware. Plus it had been a while since I’d monkeyed around with installing Linux; I was curious how hard or easy this was (bearing in mind that I was highly confident it would be easier than installing Slackware off a stack of 3.5” floppies). I gave Ubuntu a shot.
Long story short: I managed to get it working (mostly), but it required a lot of trial-and-error (and multiple reinstall-from-scratch passes). Since this was hardware I was going to retire and I was working on it in my spare time [with 4 kids, this stretched out over weeks!], I didn’t mind, but it wasn’t entirely straightforward. The documentation was relatively good, although somewhat contradictory, likely because it was from several sources that did asynchronous evolution.
Some things I encountered:
Manually configuring my partitions with gparted didn’t work the first go-round, I think due to insufficient guidance and my inability to remember (know?) limitations on needing to boot from primary partitions, and how many maximum primary partitions you’re allowed, etc. When I freed up the space and left it unallocated, and let the Ubuntu install do whatever it wanted, it worked.
The latest supported Ubuntu release for my hardware according to the community docs was 13.04 (Raring Ringtail); at the time of this experiment, the latest supported was 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), so I was already four releases behind the release train. Although I was able to install 13.04, even an upgrade to 13.10, the next release, no longer worked with my hardware (kernel panics on boot). Raring is already EOL, too: the latest updates to the mirrors were over a year ago at the time of this writing, even for security updates. Caught between retiring perfectly serviceable hardware and not having security updates is not a fun place to be. The reality is that I could buy a replacement laptop if I really needed one, but I suspect there are lots of folks with hand-me-down hardware and/or insufficient means to buy newer that would just be stuck. At least I can nmap myself, shut down all my ports, and hunker down. If push comes to shove I used to know how to build kernel images from source, but again, that’s definitely not for everyone. Tough problem: I know forward progress sometimes requires retiring support for old hardware, but there’s a long tail out there.
Because my Ubuntu release was EOL, I had to manually configure my apt
sources.listfile, through a little bit of trial and error.Got Chrome installed and hooked into updates, but could not get the Dropbox client to survive long enough to sign in. My guess is I’m so ancient the single .deb release they have isn’t really being tested vis-a-vis the installed library ecosystem I have.
Once I had my sources.list updated, I was able to install missing software and even apply updates. I initially tried just applying the security-related updates, but this introduced some instability/random crashes of stuff, until I went ahead and applied all the available updates. So far so good after that
. Ended up buying a replacement battery off EBay, around $20, which I thought was a reasonable investment for a few more years’ (hopefully) service lifetime. I’ll probably buy an el cheapo USB mouse with multiple buttons, because the trackpad has gotten desensitized at this point and clicking is kinda hard–and pounding on the trackpad button, while satisfying when in a bad mood, gets old fast. I still haven’t done the research to see what the maximum memory the motherboard supports is to see if a memory upgrade is possible; currently I have a paltry 2GB in it, which it seems to be ok with for the moment. But I think it’s probably a good bang-for-the-buck investment to keep in mind.
Ultimately, a fun project, and the thrifty part of me likes getting some extended use out of the laptop. It appears to be able to run Minecraft reasonably well (and better than the OS X installation on the same hardware!), which will make it a big hit with the kids, and it’s handy being able to have something serviceable for lightweight use when I’m on a trip where using a work laptop wouldn’t be appropriate.
Notes for myself for later/lab notebook
(I won’t rule out the possibility of needing to reinstall from scratch at some point, but I’ll probably have forgotten all this stuff by then!)
- Basic install instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook4-1/Raring
- Minecraft wants the Oracle JRE installed
- Updated sources.list
- Getting DropBox working: compile from source (requires installing the libnautilus-extension-dev, python-docutils packages). Still unclear if this works. [Update: it doesn’t, as it wants to then go download and auto-install the Dropbox daemon, which is what dies.]
- Attempt to fix resume kernel panics with http://askubuntu.com/questions/230670/apportcheckresume-recurring-error-and-gnome-shell-fixations
18 January 2015: still having kernel panics on resume/wake up. This bug seems to blame the wireless driver, which means I am going to need a new kernel somehow. Since Raring Ringtail is EOL, this either means building my own kernel, possibly with a patched source (ugh) or something else. I’m somewhat tempted to attempt an install of the most recent LTS Ubuntu release just to see if it will work with this hardware or not; since I don’t have anything important on the laptop anymore, blowing away the Linux install is still a viable option. Also suggests I should really be thinking of using this mostly as a netbook whose hard disk is mostly just temporary storage until I can push stuff out to the network sometime.
Went with 14.04.1 LTS (Trusty Tahr): so far this seems to be stable across sleep/restart. Default trackpad settings are off, though; they required pushing too hard on the trackpad. Found the settings to fix this:
$ xinput set-prop appletouch “Synaptics Finger” 10 50 0
Still need to work out how to make that trackpad setting persist across restarts. Apparently adding the above command as /etc/X11/Xsession.d/85custom_fix-trackpad may do that. Yup!
Success! Seems like everything works ok now: suspend/resume, trackpad, wireless, even Chrome and Dropbox. So, perhaps I misinterpreted the Ubuntu-on-Macbook support matrix? Possible, but the columns are labelled “most recent release” and “most recent LTS release”, which led me to think those were the maximum versions that would work. Not so, apparently. But anyway, seem to have a working, semi-stable laptop now (although I discovered that Firefox could trigger a kernel crash on certain pages; not really a big deal since I plan to use Chrome mostly).