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Seph64
Apprentice
Joined: 13 May 2003
Posts: 191
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 Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2011 3:29 pm Post subject: Getting rid of OSX and installing Linux in it's place... |
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Can it be done?
It's a late 2009 MacMini (thus it's an Intel Mac), it has a 160GB Hard Drive which is limiting. And I am too scared to deleted a NTFS partition to resize the main Windows NTFS partition. And from what I read, I have now reached the max number of available partitions available on this kind of hard ware.
So what I want to do is remove OSX and install Linux in it's place. But I am scared that removing the OSX partition will uninstall rEFIt and make the system completely unbootable.
Of course, I can just remove all the Windows partitions and redo the OSX install and start the system from scratch. If that is truely what needs to be done to avoid any major trouble.
But I'd like to see if it's possible to remove OSX and replace it with Linux. |
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wmakowski
n00b
Joined: 27 Jan 2006
Posts: 33
Location: Ohio, USA
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| Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 2:40 am Post subject: |
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| I did a little poking around and found a number of web pages on installing Linux on a Mac Mini. It looks like what you are suggesting can be done. The pages refer to both single boot and dual boot installations. The few that I read mention that you can choose whatever Linux distribution you desire. Here are the pages from my search. |
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rhumbliner
n00b
Joined: 15 Nov 2004
Posts: 59
Location: Las Vegas
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| Posted: Sun May 01, 2011 12:15 am Post subject: Getting rid of OSX and installing Linux in it's place... |
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fyi, i was able to remove mac os x from my intel mac mini and install gentoo fairly painlessly. i booted the amd64 minimal install cd and used parted to partition the 200MB harddrive. i'm using the efi's bios compatibility mode:
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(parted) mkabel msdos
(parted) mkpart primary ext2 0 32.5MB
(parted) mkpart primary linux-swap 32.5MB 544MB
(parted) mkpart primary ext3 544MB 200050MB
(parted) set 1 boot on
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parted would complain that my partitions were not optimally placed but i chose "ignore" each time and it seems to just mean that there is some free space between partitions:
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(parted) p free
Model: ATA Hitachi HTS72202 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 200GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
0.00B 511B 512B Free Space
1 512B 32.5MB 32.5MB primary ext2 boot
32.5MB 32.5MB 5632B Free Space
2 32.5MB 544MB 512MB primary linux-swap(v1)
3 544MB 200GB 200GB primary ext3
200GB 200GB 221kB Free Space
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note the 512B reserved for the MBR at the beginning of the drive.
after that i just followed the standard gentoo install. i even used grub as my bootloader.
to get around the headless boot problem i used a 68 ohm resistor inserted into the dvi port: http://help.s4rec.com/index.html |
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Installing Gentoo
