All I needed to do was to download the latest version as an ISO disk image, attach an Apple USB SuperDrive to my iMac, pop in some blank DVD media, and burn the ISO image to the DVD.
Since I did not currently have Mac OS X running on the old MacBook, installation was simple. Related: See which upgrades are compatible with your MacBook with My Upgrades Tool Sure, I could keep it on a previous release of Mac OS X, but where’s the fun in that? So what I’ve done is tried to install five different versions of Linux on the MacBook - Ubuntu 16.04.2 “Xenial Xerus”, Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” with the Cinnamon UI, Antergos 17.4, KDE Neon, and Fedora 25 Workstation. I’ll talk about the installation process for each and about how they operated - or not - on a Intel Core Duo 2 2.4 GHz MacBook. Why would I want to do this? This MacBook is about nine years old and frankly, it just doesn’t have the ability to run newer versions of macOS.
One of the more common themes in the comments was “Why run Linux in a virtual machine? Why not just install it as the only operating system on a Mac?” This week, I’m grabbed the old 13-inch white 2008 MacBook that I converted to a Chromebook last year and installed various Linux distributions on it just to see how well it operates.
So I replaced the three executables in /usr/sbin with the new ones.A few weeks ago we ran an article about how to install Linux on a Mac, and it generated a lot of comments. No more “oui Unknown”s in the tcpdump, and the DHCP server handed out addresses just fine. I just ran the newly compiled wpa_supplicant executable and it immediately fixed everything. I had to download both wpa_supplicant 0.4.8 and madwifi-old for the compile, but I didn’t replace the Breezy madwifi installation. It was only a minor version upgrade, but it was worth a shot. Then I realized I could compile the latest version of wpa_supplicant and sneak its executables on top of the ones from the package without disrupting things too much. I didn’t want things to break later on a dist-upgrade. I didn’t want to install startup scripts. No one seemed to be having this exact problem with wpa_supplicant. Tracing through tcpdump, at 2:30 in the morning, it didn’t seem right that every line listed “(oui Unknown)”. But after some idle time, it would stop working again. But other computers couldn’t ping it, until it pinged them. In fact, the version of WPA supplicant included in Breezy did not work with my Airport Express. But I’ve had such an easy time at home with the Airport Express connected to Macs that I was lulled into a false sense of the WPA’s compatibility. The crappy, recently purchased SonicWall wireless router we have at work can’t handle WPA with any system for more than five minutes. I should have known that WPA would be trouble. Update: wpa_supplicant configuration is different for Dapper, and includes a newer version so compiling from source (described below) should not be necessary.
All I had to do was set-up WPA through Breezy’s wpa_supplicant package, since the “madwifi” driver only does WEP (and I don’t do WEP). I swapped the two cards and the SMC was recognized and ready to transmit on the very next boot.
(Modern life is complicated.) I was nervous about not having the second Ethernet as a backup, but I was won over by the idea of a stubby black antenna poking out of the server instead of USB-dongled box. The whole point of this WiFi adventure was to physically separate the Airport Express and the server, since the DSL phone line is too far from my speakers to make use of AirTunes. This box shares that connection, hands out address through DHCP, serves two websites, handles my e-mail in both directions, and purrs pleasantly through it all. The built-in Ethernet is attached to the real Internet. My little Biostar box only has one PCI slot, and it was taken by an Ethernet card connected to the Airport Express. I didn’t want to be one of those people, so I bought the SMC SMCWPCI-G, a $25 PCI card with an Atheros chipset that’s automatically detected by Breezy’s “restricted-modules” package. People expect whatever crappy hardware that works in XP (via some malware-esque taskbar blob) to work in Ubuntu, and only most of it does. I know there’s a lot of whining about Ubuntu’s wireless networking support (and Linux’s in general).
And it only took me five hours, three glasses of wine, and a big headache to get it working.