Debian On Mac Mini

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Fred
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Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

My guide:

Download and burn a business card or netinst image of squeeze or wheezy. I chose wheezy as my target was Sid/Unstable and it currently lags by only 2 weeks. During the install I had to revise the sid plan as the files were inconsistent (you can choose your distro from the installer) and install wheezy. After installing if you want to, which you probably do if its a desktop system, you can change the sources.list to sid/unstable from wheezy and be happy. No need to upgrade anything, wheezy is current enough and future installs will be the latest at all times.
  • Install rEFIt from macos (easy, just get dmg, double click package, enter password)
  • reboot twice second time should have refit menu (something to do with apple's firmware) If not, see refit trouble shooting section
  • In spotlight type "disk u" and choose the first option.
  • Live resize your mac os partition to make free space for install
  • insert install cd while booted and restart (wont be recognised by refit if inserted while restarting, physical mechanism is too slow)
  • Select penguin with disk symbol and boot install CD, install
  • Use guided and setup your partitions (gpt, root, swap at the least)
  • Install grub in /dev/sda (I did this later, but should work in the install too)
  • Eject disk
  • Reboot
  • Penguin should now have hdd symbol, choose, enter grub
  • press e before the time out and remove quiet and add acpi=ht
  • Watch debian boot and be fast etc.
There may be better kernel options to add, but I've not found them yet, and being a desktop, I don't care much about ACPI.

Fred.
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

Boot time log and console text res is now done through grub2 with these options in /etc/defaults/grub

GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

you can get a list of valid modes from grub console with "vbeinfo", just remember to run "pager=on" first

I think if you prefer a low res grub you can replace keep with the numbers and it may work.

don't use vga=? as a kernel parameter anymore.

Fred.
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

Reboot fails without reboot=pci kernel option, adding this to the first post.
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

Also, vesa driver gives 1024/768 on a 1280/1024 monitor in X, whereas fbdev works correctly. So far nouveau (FOSS nvidia) and nv (proprietary nvidia) refuse to load, possibly to do with the acpi=off thing. I read on the net in lots of places that nvid ONLY works with acpi=off, but I'm still suspicious and still working on it.

apt-get remove <list all xserver-xorg-video-* drivers one by one here, except nvidia, nouveau, fbdev>

fbdev will work regardless and gives you a usable gui, vesa may work for you, I don't know, didn't work for me.

EDIT, of course, fbdev gives no GLX extension, no 3d or 2d accel and burns cpu doing ordinary things. Still, beats looking at a blurry screen.

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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

fbdev is gone, nvidia is in, just followed the instructions... woops.

http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

currently got acpi=ht too and may experiment with other options.

9000fps in glxgears.

Next up, wifi so I can unplug the cable from the eee and resetup my extra wifi point.

Fred.
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

For the record, I'd been wondering how to partially configure X11 for quite a long time, and never bothered to research it. I stumbled across it during this process and it's as simple as this:

Code: Select all

fred@cheetah:~$ cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-nvidia.conf 
Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        BusID       "PCI:5:0:0"
EndSection
Just add the snippets that you need and you're good.

Wifi works too, I'm running nm-applet with sudo, but the FOSS broadcom supplied drivers are in and seem to work just fine.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drive ... cm80211.29

Fonts are, as usual, screwed up, so need to fix that, and keyboard layout has F keys linked to Bullshit, so I need to fix that, I forget how, but I did find out at some point while not using my mac keyboard... damn it.

I'm unsure if the card reader is functioning, I think something in there is working as, oddly, I got a gui popup when I put a card in. The drivers look to load ok, but the device doesn't appear. Unsure what is going on with that.

Sound worked out of the box.

Kernel version is 2.6.39-2-686-pae, default install for wheezy at the time. 3.0.0 rc5 and rc6 are in the repos, though. Perhaps once that stabilises and is released I'll migrate to it, just for a laugh, and rebuild the nvidia stuff to go with it.

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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

Fred wrote:I'm unsure if the card reader is functioning, I think something in there is working as, oddly, I got a gui popup when I put a card in. The drivers look to load ok, but the device doesn't appear. Unsure what is going on with that.
It was working fine, the device names are odd due to the driver, I had a machine like this once before:

Code: Select all

/dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0p1
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

Code: Select all

fred@cheetah:~$ sudo lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP89 HOST Bridge (rev a1)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP89 Memory Controller (rev a1)
00:01.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d6d (rev a1)
00:01.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d6e (rev a1)
00:01.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d6f (rev a1)
00:01.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d70 (rev a1)
00:02.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d71 (rev a1)
00:02.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d72 (rev a1)
00:03.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP89 LPC Bridge (rev a2)
00:03.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP89 Memory Controller (rev a1)
00:03.2 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP89 SMBus (rev a1)
00:03.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP89 Memory Controller (rev a1)
00:03.4 Co-processor: nVidia Corporation MCP89 Co-Processor (rev a1)
00:04.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP89 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a1)
00:04.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP89 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP89 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a1)
00:06.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP89 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:08.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP89 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
00:0a.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP89 SATA Controller (rev a2)
00:0b.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0d75 (rev a1)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0d9a (rev a1)
00:15.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0d9b (rev a1)
00:16.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0d9b (rev a1)
00:17.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP89 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)
01:00.0 PCI bridge: Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 PCI Express to PCI Bridge (rev 01)
02:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 IEEE-1394b OHCI Controller (rev 01)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 01)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
04:00.1 SD Host controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Memory Card Reader
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT216 [GeForce 320M] (rev a2)
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

viewtopic.php?p=7786#p7786

+ ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Fixed.
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Re: Debian On Mac Mini

Post by Fred »

Keyboard is fixed!

Code: Select all

root@cheetah:/home/fred# cat /etc/modprobe.d/hid-apple.conf 
# Make function keys work for console switching and other normal things.
# 0 = no fn keys
# 1 = apple special function is default, hold fn for normal function
# 2 = normal fn behaviour is default, hold fn for apple function
options hid_apple fnmode=2

root@cheetah:/home/fred# rmmod hid_apple ;modprobe hid_apple
root@cheetah:/home/fred# update-initramfs -u
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.39-2-686-pae
Other than package installation, which is per user anyway, that's about it. I'll likely put up my sources.list and various other tools that I install, just as a reference, but this is a solid start!

Fred.
DIYEFI.org - where Open Source means Open Source, and Free means Freedom
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