Advice Ubuntu - Mac Mini

[Poag]

Has any had any experience installing Ubuntu on a Mac previously?

My current HTPC is a mac mini and its starting to run like a dog. Its a 2009 Mac Mini, its been slowing down over the years and atm its having trouble transcoding at times.

So i'm looking to install Ubuntu on it to give it a bit more life, thus wondering if anyone has had any experience doing such?

 

[Scouse]

Wang it on a USB stick and boot from there - try it out on that hardware first

 

[caLLous]

You (apparently) can't just make a bootable USB stick for a Mac because of the way their BIOS manages bootable drives. You have to jump through some hoops to get it boot. Installing Linux permanently sounds like a proper ballache as well. This guy said that Ubuntu Server 13.04 was the only version that he got working, which is a bit shit because it's not an LTS release but it should be ok still.

Apple always have to make everything so difficult.

 

[Yaka]

http://askubuntu.com/questions/301457/installing-ubuntu-onto-mac-mini personaly go for it, if you run into problems ive always found ubuntu forums the best place to get help

 

[Poag]

FOr those interested I completed the change over last night.

I had a false start where when attempting to install the 13.10 server edition the keyboard would die, the desktop version went on ok. After nosing around it was a bug in the 13.10 installer. So i threw 14 on it last night and resetup my scrapers and downloaders and the media server.

Works excellently again, no trouble transcoding. The only hard part of the process was getting the mac to accept the USB boot, hammering the Alt key gets you half way, but you need an EFI partition to get further, formating an extra partition onto the USB stick got me around that one tho.


Highly recommend it!