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Recover iopensa's iMac with a cute GNU/Linux distribution
Closed, ResolvedPublic9 Points

Description

We have an iMac that is completely borked. It's slow as shit.

Let's recover this bare metal as part of the Officina Informatica Libera lockdown edition.

asd

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Resolvedvalerio.bozzolan

Event Timeline

valerio.bozzolan created this task.
valerio.bozzolan added a subtask: Unknown Object (Maniphest Task).Nov 17 2020, 12:23

Here we are.

Report for the people trying to squeeze Free software onto Apple computers:

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was able to boot and that's the reason we used it to Free this machine a little bit.

NOTE: Ventoy was not able to boot any damn distribution, stucking on a black screen, with a full white cursor pointer in the middle of the screen. You have to manually flash an USB device.
NOTE: Debian GNU/Linux buster 10 was not able to boot.
NOTE: We replaced the HDD with an SSD Crucial MX500 500GB but the installation failed twice because of strange I/O errors, like what happens with old HDD with hardware failures. This nonsense was fixed formatting again the SSD with gparted. I created a GPT partition table with an ext4 and the next installation went successfully. Absolutely don't know what happened.
NOTE: Now there is an unfriendly UEFI-related warning at startup probably spawned by the iMac's BIOS screaming at the sight of some Free software. Anyway it disappears after few seconds so I just decided to apply the don't care way.
WARNING: The Wi-Fi needs a proprietary Broadcom firmware to work.. Anyway it's automatically recognized by the Ubuntu's driver wizard.
WARNING: The NVIDIA video card needs a proprietary firmware to work but also without that support the video is good. Anyway it's automatically recognized by the Ubuntu's driver wizard.
WARNING: GNOME freezes when changing the user session. Maybe we can try replacing gdm with lightdm but untested.
valerio.bozzolan changed the point value for this task from 4 to 9.Nov 19 2020, 23:00