2

A friend of mine has a MacBook Pro from 2014 that has a completely screwed-up, non-running Mac OS system. She is tired of it and wants me to install Ubuntu instead of it.

I've got the image of Ubuntu on a USB stick and am trying to get the MacBook Pro to boot from it.

d3pd
  • 3,661
  • I would use rEFInd. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind There are some guides online for dual booting with OS X. You may have to do some digging though to get all of her hardware working after install, screen brightness, audio, etc. just as you want. Here is an example of a guide. http://www.howtogeek.com/187410/how-to-install-and-dual-boot-linux-on-a-mac/ – jbrock Feb 24 '16 at 14:50
  • You may also want to try booting a few different desktop environments on USB to make sure she does indeed prefer Unity and not Xfce, Gnome, etc. – jbrock Feb 24 '16 at 14:51
  • Mac's can be a bit tricky with bootup. rEFInd is a must, but it's quite a lot easier if you install that from OSX. So it might be a good idea to reinstall OSX from its recovery either way. I run Ubuntu on a macbook air, which is a lovely experience. But to get boot as pain-free as possible, I have OSX on an external HDD, and installed rEFInd on a separate mac HFS partition on my internal SSD. – eira wahlin Feb 24 '16 at 15:57

1 Answers1

2

I don't know how much has changed between 2008 and 2014, but I recently installed Ubuntu on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it was amazingly simple. Since Mac uses EFI boot, the machine I was working with detected my Ubuntu 15.10 drive without issue using the stock bootloader (though I had to add "nomodeset" to the Grub boot command or Ubuntu would hang.) Simply make free space on your disk using Mac's a boot disk utility (or not if OSX won't even boot,) make an Ubuntu live USB and plug it in, hold the Option key while it boots, and select your drive. Once booted, install like normal.

I did a dual boot, but if you indeed plan on completely replacing OSX, this post has instructions for rebuilding an EFI boot partition: EFI boot Ubuntu 14.04 on a Mac without rEFInd

If the current OSX installation runs at all (or can be fixed using recovery (command+R at boot)), it may be wise to make an OSX install disk just in case running Ubuntu turns out to be more of a fight than you want to deal with (which was my case): http://macmint.com/how-to-make-an-os-x-yosemite-install-drive/

Best of luck!

Community
  • 1
Tropcon
  • 166