#CAN YOU INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC DRIVERS#
#CAN YOU INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC UPDATE#
#CAN YOU INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC DRIVER#

(If you got to that stage, see the ''recovery for nvidia drivers EFI crash'' below). If you install the nvidia drivers while Ubuntu is in EFI mode, you'll get a blank/black screen at the beginning of the boot.

#CAN YOU INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC DRIVER#

But here is the catch: the driver requires the computer to boot in 'Legacy BIOS mode', not in 'EFI' mode (see here or here). To avoid that, you need to install the proprietary nvidia driver. The problem exists with Raring and I expect it arises with Precise (though see ''alternative solutions' below). You can do a default install, it will boot normally, but you'll soon see little glitches here and there and the computer will normally crash after a few minutes of use (especially when transparency or shadow effects are used, it seems). The graphic driver that Ubuntu installs by default (Nouveau) has bugs with the MacBook Air 3 graphic processor, the nvidia GeForce 320M (G320M). The core problem with the installation is this. If full graphics performance is desired, a 'Legacy BIOS Install' is needed.įrom the forum post that the commenter cites, which is concerned with a MacBook Air 3,2:

A helpful commenter, Brian Moran, writes that, when installing Ubuntu on an older Mac with a NVIDIA graphics card, it may be better to 'boot in 'Legacy BIOS mode', not in 'EFI' mode':Īpparently what is happening is that both the open source and Nvidia drivers are buggy when doing an 'EFI Install' on Mac machines.

#CAN YOU INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC UPDATE#

UPDATE (February 2017): Before moving ahead, you may want to consider the following. Furthermore I think all the data I had on my USB stick is lost due to it being formatted in a certain way at some point in the procedure. There are ways to dual-boot both, but I wasn't interested in that as Mavericks was running super slow on this computer. For example I believe I had to do steps 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11 only because I have a MBP with an Intel chip.Īlso, WARNING, this procedure completely wiped my OS X and all the files and applications on that installation, as I intended. I believe I bought it in the summer of 2009.Īgain, note, this worked for me and my machine but may not for you. Note that I didn't want to partition my hard drive to allow myself to dual-boot either in OS X or Ubuntu- I was going for a full replacement, and thus would and did lose all the files on applications I had on the old Mac.īut regardless, here is the process I took. I now realize, I think, that the reason the process of installing even a popular Linux distribution on a common (if old) model computer isn't written out or easily findable is that the process is a bit different for everyone, depending on the distro, the version, and the hardware you're starting with. I also, confusingly, hadn't found a clean, step-by-step guide for doing this, so I promised I'd write my process out as thoroughly but simply as I could once I got it done. I had never installed or even used Linux before (to my knowledge). I had an old 17-inch MacBook Pro from 2009 (college) lying around and I figured it'd be a fun challenge to install Linux on it.

Can you install ubuntu on a mac