Recently my wife’s Macbook air has been giving her issues connecting to many websites due to an expired root SSL certificate for Let’s encrypt. More info here. Basically, since Apple no longer supports this machine, we couldn’t update it and fix this issue and Google Chrome no longer has updates for the version of OS X this will run. So we decided to install Linux on it and extend the life of this computer, it still works great and is in pretty good condition. Why get rid of it when it’s still an awesome little computer!?
I had her back up all the files on this laptop and proceeded to install Linux Mint on it. This is an older machine so I was worried about performance, but it turned out okay.
The steps to install Linux on a mac are:
- Download the Linux distro of your choice (I used Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition)
- Create bootable USB using Rufus
- Shutdown the Mac
- Turn on the mac while holding down the alt/option key.
- Select EFI
- Linux will boot to the installer, once their click the “Install Linux Mint” button on the desktop
- Go through all the prompts
- Reboot once the installation is finished.
It wasn’t as simple as this for us. We had to manually install the wireless driver once the computer booted as the installer didn’t do that automatically. Luckily, all the driver files were on the USB installer so I was able to go find and install them.
The driver required was bcmwl-kernel-source_6.**+bdcom-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb which I was able to find on the boot disk, I opened that installer and found it had a couple of dependencies, so I installed those and then installed the driver and I was able to get everything working.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to remap the keyboard, that will be a later post once I’ve figured out all the keys that need to be remapped.
By the way, this can be done on currently supported Macs as well. Apple makes really great hardware and there are so many great Linux distros out there, it really is a great match.