Installation on Mac mini

I was a CentOS user from the days of 5.1, using old Dell server hardware. I am trying to repurpose some old Mac mini hardware orphaned by Apple, a 2011 model with 2.5 GHz i5, 4 gigs memory, and 500 gig disk for starters. I took a three pack of identical 16 gig flash disks and used Balena Etcher for macOS to write the Rocky 8.4 ISO onto one of them. It wrote and validated trouble free. I plug it into the mini and held the option key and when the list of boot devices came up, the flash disk showed up as EFI_boot. When I select it, the system freezes. The flash disk booted a Dell laptop into the installer without issue. For another test, I took a second 16 gig flash disk identical to the first and wrote the Security Onion 2.3.52 ISO onto it, same method as before. It shows up as WINDOWS in the mini’s list of bootable devices, and selecting it boots into the Security Onion installer. Any guesses why it works but the Rocky image freezes the system? I have a really nice 2011 quad core i7 mini server that Apple won’t support any more, and sure would love to get Rocky to run on it. Any suggestions are welcome.

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Update: I now have RL running on a mini server 2010 model and the 2011 desktop model that I mentioned, right on the metal, no underlying OS or virtualization needed. Just like I wanted. Next will be the 2011 server box.

Can you share technical details how you got it working.

I will be in the same situation before long and would be interested to know how you did it.

I also have an external Thunderbolt disk enclosure attached, I’m guessing that would not be able to be carried across to a setup where Rocky Linux has a to the metal install on the Mac Mini.

I received nothing but crickets in this topic up until now so I assumed there was no interest. Anyhow, I canned the idea of using a flash disk containing an ISO image and just wrote the minimal install ISO onto a regular ol’ DVD and connected a USB optical drive with it inside. Holding down the option key at boot showed the DVD as WINDOWS and selecting it booted right into the install menu. Test install media didn’t work but selecting install ran the installer, and zapping all the macOS partitions and letting it do the install worked like on any other Intel box. Once it installed, I got Gnome installed to have a regular desktop like I recall having using CentOS on Dell hardware.

BTW I see messages such as Thunderbolt and Apple keyboard detected flash by during startup so there is possibly more support for on-the-metal Mac hardware installs than you would expect.

Sounds promising, I might even be able to the external Thunderbolt HDD enclosure working, that would be neat. Of course actual driver support to mount the drives, as RAID even, is an unknown at this point :wink:

New update: Since I have the full Gnome environment running on my mini’s, doing View Updates in the Details section inside Settings told me about OS updates, so I hit download then install. After the boxes were done grinding for like 55 minutes, checking Details told me that they were running 8.5. Boy that’s about as simple as doing updates with macOS. Two boxes down, one to go.

I just got done installing RL 8.5 on a new 2012 mini that I got hold of, a 2.6 GHz i7 model with 16 gigs of memory and 1 TB hard disk. I noticed that Thunderbolt shows up in the Devices under Gnome as shown:
IMG_1104

By the way that box runs RL quite quickly. I’m starting to get quite the RL server farm using orphaned Apple hardware.

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This thread was helpful to get a Mac mini (2012) running Rocky. When creating your installation media on a USB stick using a Macintosh running MacOS, do not forget to convert the downloaded ISO image to IMG using hdiutil.

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o <path-to-Rocky-8.5-x86_64-dvd1> <path-to-Rocky-8.5-x86_64-dvd1.iso>

Then write the resulting .dmg file with dd to your USB stick. Note that the first file path is the OUTPUT file, the second is the path to the downloaded installation image. This extra step saved me from needing to find a DVD drive and media.

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Here is a good set of guides aimed at iMacs: https://blog.microlinux.fr/ - it translates well in Google Translate if you need that.

I was able to follow these mostly unaltered (ignore the stuff about the French keyboard unless applicable, and ignore the video card setup as the mini has Intel graphics that work fine with a standard Rocky Linux Workstation groupinstall). Pay close attention to the partitioning steps and refer to Partitionner un disque sous Rocky Linux 8 – Le blog technique de Microlinux if necessary and be sure to fill out all the fields as described and click the “update settings” button for each partition. I chose to use a slightly higher /boot partition of 1 GB when doing this and chose xfs for the / partition but otherwise it went fine.

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For the record, since RHEL 8.7 the installer complains if your /boot partition is less than 500 MB, so I went for 600 MB (I’m the author of the french blog).

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Hi microlinux,

I have had trouble trying to get this config working.

I am on a 2914 MacBook Pro dual boot with Mac osx.

Now, I followed your instructions in French and google translate and got as far as editing the .config file it worked. But then when I rebooted the install wouldn’t stick (if that makes sense) I would be really great full if you could help me out and point me in the right direction for the installation of 8.7

This is my last effort to get it going then I’m out of ideas , 4 weeks later

Many thanks

Hi can you post how to get irocky 8.7 installed I got all way through to the reboot at the end and then I reboot and the install had disappeared from the boot loader menu.

It’s been a little while, but my recollection is that I had to boot the install media into rescue mode following the installation, and then repair the boot partition with grub. I have, unfortunately misplaced my notes on this.

Thank you was it something along these lines? Also, how do I partition the drive in the first place the tutorial above is quite complex and I’m not sure which to follow so far I have partition drive UEFI + GPT partition but is it ok to use a live version of rocky to do this before running installation?


My approach consisted of writing a minimal install ISO to a DVD, then booting from a USB optical drive. With 2012 and earlier models, there is no supported version of macOS so you might as well just install Linux on the entire disk and not bother with dual boot. I have done that successfully on a number of 2010 to 2012 mac minis as well as a 2012 MacBook Pro.

You have to manually create the partition table. Automatic won’t work for some reason. I think the live version should be fine. As long as you create the necessary partitions.

Honestly, I’ve been avoiding dual boot scenarios for the last 20 years or so. I just wiped the obsolete OS X installation and installed Linux as a full-fledged replacement.

The tutorial I published is aimed at the intermediate-to-expert admin. You should have a pretty good knowledge of using fdisk and gdisk manually in legacy vs. UEFI boot mode, know your way about GRUB configuration etc. If you’re new to Linux and want to cut your teeth by installing Rocky Linux on an old iMac or MacBook, then welcome to a world of pain. :upside_down_face:

Cheers,

Niki

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As mentioned above, this works for converting a Mac to Linux only, not for dual-boot.On the positive side, my old 2012 Mac mini that had gotten pretty much unsupportable with MacOS is now a perfectly modern, fast, well-behaved Linux machine with this method!

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I have done this procedure on a good number of 2012 model quad core i7 minis now. The price of these boxes on ebay is such that you can get a pair of them for what a Raspberry Pi 4 costs nowadays. I have a stack of them now that I have running RL for a Plex server, a Wordpress web server, a Guacamole server, and file servers, along with one running as a Security Onion manager node. I have plans for another one or two of them sitting around such as an email server.