I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#1

Post by singuerinc » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 8:23 PM UTC

I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook
medium.com

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#2

Post by andreiw » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 11:39 AM UTC

That "ugly white notebook" was one of the most usable laptops in its day, *nix or windows, and it still isn't that ancient - computing innovation really has slowed down significantly. Compare to notebooks from '96 and point out the novelty of running a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit machine.

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#3

Post by jonathonf » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 11:46 AM UTC

Lesson one: Use a DVD-RW instead of a DVD-R. Lesson two: Use a USB flash drive instead of optical media.

The 32-bit EFI vs 64-bit system issue has reared its head again with some Windows 8 tablets (e.g. HP Stream 7). Switching the iso's EFI boot files is an easy way to solve this.

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#4

Post by zlatan_todoric » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 11:47 AM UTC

I installed on even older MacBook Debian Unstable (with part from experimental), Plasma 5 environment (gnome doesn't work because old Intel card supports only to OpenGL 2.1) without any problems and even full fledged KWin. Installation process was: copy netinstall image to usb, sync it, plug usb into macbook and install Debian. Everything works without any problem.

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#5

Post by bobajeff » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 1:23 PM UTC

I've been learning docker on an old 64bit IBM designed for XP using the a newish version of lubuntu.

There are still some things that make it unintuitive and in my view incomplete (eg. a command to copy/cut/paste/delete volumes).

A couple things I've found out: You should definitely use the Overlay FS driver as soon as possible; don't use DeviceMapper. Also, It can be convenient to use data volume containers but watch out for orphaned files in /var/lib/docker/tmp and always use -v.

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#6

Post by guylepage3 » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 1:40 PM UTC

Awesome article. I have been thinking about setting up a RPi as a server lately as well. Do you know if RancherOS will run on the Pi2?

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#7

Post by 0942v8653 » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 1:53 PM UTC

guylepage3 wrote: post #6

Awesome article. I have been thinking about setting up a RPi as a server lately as well. Do you know if RancherOS will run on the Pi2?

https://github.com/rancher/os/issues/417

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#8

Post by jakobegger » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 2:00 PM UTC

This brings back memories of my first website. I hosted it on my white iBook G3, and I used dyndns to get a free hostname for my dynamic IP. The website was only accessible when I was at home, and plugged in (we had no Wifi yet).

It was pretty popular with my classmates for some time -- there was a self-written forum on it where you could upload photos, and people used it to share holiday pictures (this was before Facebook allowed everyone to share stuff online)

Unfortunately at some point the HD crashed and I lost the database since I had no backup of it -- I just didn't know where MySQL stored its files.

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#9

Post by vladsanchez » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

I wish I still own my PowerBook17 to install CoreOS too. Like the author, I installed almost every distro until I settled on Ubuntu, but it was not enough. Inspiring article! Thanks for sharing.

Re: I installed CoreOS on a 9-year-old MacBook

#10

Post by NotOscarWilde » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

Good work! We have a black MacBook from the same era at our house; my girlfriend uses Ubuntu on it as her main computer. Should have thought about blogging about it!

That 32-bit EFI with 64-bit CPU is a real curse for installing recent Linux (although Ubuntu did release "amd64+mac" ISO images for these computers, I think even 14.04 is available this way).

Additionally, my internal DVD drive for this MacBook failed, so I had to use an external DVD drive for booting said Ubuntu. It had the weirdest bug -- you had to reboot from rEFInd three times for the EFI boot to recognize that the external DVD drive has a bootable DVD in it. First time, it won't see it, second time, it won't see it, and on the third reboot, it magically does.

The reason is likely because the drive spins up too slow and the EFI boot timeouts unless the drive is powered up from an earlier spinup.

Besides the internal drive failing, the machine with Ubuntu on it is perfectly usable as a main laptop for a student. It shows how the laptop scene did not improve that much in the last 9 years -- and that one can save quite a bit of money if he buys a reliable machine and treats it well.