

- #HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC FOR FREE#
- #HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC MAC OS#
- #HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC DRIVERS#
- #HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC UPDATE#
- #HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC FULL#
#HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC DRIVERS#
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.
#HOW TO 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.
#HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC FULL#
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.
#HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC FOR FREE#
While your Ubuntu Linux virtual machine won't replace your Mac or the applications on it, you can certainly learn a lot more about the Linux world and about virtual machines for free through this tutorial. The word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications of OpenOffice are all pre-installed with Ubuntu, along with calendar and email functions. You also have a full office suite installed on your virtual Linux machine. Think of this as the "App Store" for Linux. This is your portal to a large library of software, all of which you can download with a click or two. While I will leave the task of learning Ubuntu Linux up to you, one thing I will point out is the Add/Remove Software item under the Applications menu. You can read Ubuntu's built-in help files by clicking on the question mark icon in the menu bar.
#HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU ON A MAC MAC OS#
The user interface is somewhat different from that of Mac OS X, so you'll have to get used to it. Once the updates are done, it's time to play with your Ubuntu virtual machine. On my first-generation MacBook Air, this took about a half-hour and required a restart of the virtual machine at completion. It is recommended to simply click the Install Updates button, which will download and install those updates for you. Choose to Save the ISO file rather than Open or mount it.īy default, Ubuntu wants to download and install all software updates made since the distribution was first shipped. Choose a download host close to your geographical location from the pop-up menu, then click the Begin Download button to start transferring the file to your Mac. The download page should recognize that you're browsing from a Mac and offer the Intel Mac ISO image. You'll end up with a VirtualBox icon in your Applications folder. When the download is done, mount the disk image and follow the simple installation instructions. Choose the link for Intel Macs (sorry, it doesn't run on those old PowerPC Macs), and click the download link. To get a free copy of Sun's excellent VirtualBox VM environment, point your browser to. In this short how-to post, I'll demonstrate how I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04, also known as "Jaunty Jackalope." While you can create a bootable partition on your Mac and boot Linux from it, I prefer to do things the lazy way. Why would you want to run Linux on a Mac? There are probably a few good reasons - learning about a different OS, using software that's not available on the Mac platform, or for a Linux class in school. Not only can you install Linux distributions on a Mac using VirtualBox, but it's extremely easy to do. How about Linux?," which set up a challenge.

The tweet asked, "You did a post about installing Win 7 on the Mac for free. I received a private tweet from a reader the other day, who asked a question about a previous post in which I had installed Windows 7 RC1 on a Mac using Sun's VirtualBox.
