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elecasei 08-18-2015 04:23 PM
Linux in a Mac: to be, or not to be?
 
Hello!
I have a 2010 iMac and I'm sick of OS X. My desire is to install a linux distro (like Fedora) and forget the apple.

A few months ago I installed Fedora in a partition of the computer, but the partition where OS X was got damaged. Besides, when I updated the system, the new kernel presented an error, so I had to use an old one. Because of these problems I decided to erase the Fedora partitions and reinstall OS X.

Now I'm using OS X El Capitan beta and I really want to install again Fedora (or other distro). Everyday since I have OS X I think about installing Linux, nevertheless, if I turn my computer into Linux I know I'll be worried about posible problems or even harm the iMac. (Of course If I install linux I will keep a little partition with OS X.)

Please help me! I have to decide between to be (installing Linux) or not to be (keeping OS X).
Does anyone have experience with linux in a mac?

Thanks!

Timothy Miller 08-18-2015 04:47 PM
Honestly, the experience will be pretty much identical to a standard pc. Once Mac's stopped using the PPC CPU's, the hardware is identical to a PC other than having one extra chip on the motherboard that essentially sets there screaming "I'M A MAC, I'M A MAC!!!" so that OSX will install properly.

The support for your hardware will probably be fairly good, except maybe the graphics card, as I know Apple loved using ATI/AMD graphics, whose proprietary linux drivers are garbage, although the open source drivers aren't bad. Although I admit I don't remember what graphics that machine ran, I imagine that would be the ONLY possible piece of hardware at this point that wouldn't be well supported.

elecasei 08-18-2015 04:53 PM
Thanks!
So you wouldn't worry about the kernel or the disk problems, right?

(Computer is running an ATI Radeon HD 5670 512 MB)

Timothy Miller 08-18-2015 05:54 PM
Kernel in any modern OS should be great with most of the hardware on anything intel based circa 2010. The Radeon MIGHT be problematic, I don't use ATI chips because of the multitudes of issues with Linux and ATI graphics. Someone else may have a similar card and be able to say for sure, but according to the AMD documentation, that card should be supported by both the proprietary AND open source drivers.

elecasei 08-19-2015 05:42 AM
Thanks again!

I found that AMD has its own drivers and they support Ubuntu, RedHat and openSuse *.
I never expected to have a complete open source machine (not with this imac at least...), but I guess that this could solve the problem, couln't it?
Maybe I have to install Suse or Ubuntu, instead of Fedora...

jdkaye 08-19-2015 07:02 AM
I've always used ATI graphics and never had a problem. In the olden days we used to have to compile a driver, fglrx, using module-assistant and modprobe it into place. Those days are long gone and the radeon driver does the job to my total satisfaction. Here are my current specs:
Code:
          *-display
                description: VGA compatible controller
                product: RV710 [Radeon HD 4350/4550]
                vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
                version: 00
                width: 64 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
                configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
                resources: irq:33 memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f7e20000-f7e2ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:f7e00000-f7e1ffff
jdk

elecasei 08-20-2015 09:44 AM
Thanks again.
So do you think that installing openSuse (and keeping a little partition with OS X) would right and error free?


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