Mac mini March: Debian on a Mac mini

Hey, Linux g33ks. In case you hadn’t heard, Torvalds uses a Mac. It’s the cool thing to do these days. jcdenton, a guest poster over at Mac Mini Hacks has posted a link to this tutorial for installing Debian on a Mac mini. The tutorial explains, ”Personally, I bought the Mac Mini as a replacement for my girlfriend’s aging 1GHz Pentium-III system. Thanks to the portability of Debian and its advanced package management tools, making her new Mac look like her old PC took only an hour or so.”

For the most part, the Mac mini hardware is Linux-compatible; however, there are a few trouble spots: Apple Intrepid Audio is unsupported but will probably be fixed soon, Apple Bluetooth module remains untested but should work, Apple 56K V.92 modem remains untested but may work, and Apple Airport Extreme (802.11g) is both unsupported and a fix is unlikely.

So, the good / bad news is: You can install Debian on your Mac Mini (yay!), but you should have a broadband Ethernet connection and USB mouse and keyboard handy, as Airport, modem, and Bluetooth support are all either iffy or never going to happen (boo!).

[via MacSlash]

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Hey, Linux g33ks. In case you hadn’t heard, Torvalds uses a Mac. It’s the cool thing to do these days. jcdenton, a...

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Gammah

I'm a long time linux user, and *I* don't understand why in HELL you'd buy a mac and NOT use Mac OS. OSX is better than linux will EVER be. It has all the best of the unix-guts, and the best window manager in existence. I mean KDE? A joke; Same with Gnome. But, I still think it's cool to get linux running on anything; but to buy a mac to run linux doesn't make sense.

December 01 2005 at 11:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Borun D. Chowdhury

The Bluetooth works perfectly fine. My keyboard and mouse both communicate over Bluetooth.

March 26 2005 at 6:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Matt

Umm...why not just run Yellow Dog Linux? Is there a reason to use Debian instead? Beats me...I admit I'm not a Linux expert or anything, but I installed YDL on an old iMac once for fun and played around with it for a few days...not quite sure what's so "great" about it when OS X already has BSD command-line goodness built-in, and if you get tired of typing at the command line you can use a *real* GUI instead of something that looks like a half-baked rip-off of Win95.

March 16 2005 at 12:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

I just don't see the point in using Linux on a Mac. But I am a long-time Mac user. For people using Linux it's nice to be able to run the OS they are used to and love. It's a pity they don't give OS X a try, or make a dual boot system. My girlfriend would kill me if I put Linux on her G5.

March 15 2005 at 8:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply