Followint my last comment... i am stuck at the boot... it seems that is not recognizing the ATI card of my MPB 2,2...
THANK YOU for the ISO images here...
I have an old Imac mid-2006 intel, white plastic case. It has been sitting on a shelf literally for 10+ years.
Evaluating this MATE distribution for other reasons (raspberry PI), I stumbled onto a whim that I could maybe try running this distro on this old Imac. At first I tried the i386 release 18.04 from the downloads page. Slow and clanky as expected, but somewhat useable. meh.
Then I stumbled upon this thead, and tried the 20.04 ISO posted by KTrad. OMG what an improvement. I am able to run this machine with the latest 64bit kernel.. it is responsive and smooth with some light doomscrolling in chromium, can use it to ssh out to my other machines, I even took a zoom call on it. A NICE retro piece. I would not have believed that this could be done with a 15 year old box.
Even better: I can boot this kernel standalone to kodi-19 and stream live or recorded tv from my mythtv pvr! Unreal, it doesn't even lag once i turned off interlacing.
Again thanks to user KTrad for posting that ISO.. really a success story for this Imac, I'm still pinching myself, a great time killer project LOL, my wife thinks I'm nuts.
Next, I have a BIG 24-inch late 06 Imac of the same stripe which has Nvidia hardware issues (driver version 304 unsupported) which I have not been able to get working to my satisfaction yet. That's another thread.
cheers -bruce.
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You are a legend thank you so much
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Thank you so much. I am a nitwit, but you made it possible to make it clear to me.Mac is lovely on Mate 20.4. Bless you!
Thanks a lot. Made my Mac Pro 2.66 bought for cheap work perfectly.
KTrad thanks for this, great work. I installed 20.04 version in 2 tablets efi 32 and run smoothly.
Mattgradient version are only for DVD install, my 5.1 Imac has a not working DVD drive.
Since mac can boot from usb, do you now if there any procedure to make your mate 20.04 booteable for mac?
Thansk a lot.
Finally i create a booteable usb with Rufus adding efi32 capability, etcher does not work for me.
Mac 5.1 totally working, good response with SSD, 4GB...except for the rv530/x1600 drivers, i could boot up with nomodeset, video aceleration is not posible so far.
I'm stuck, sorry.
I'm using USB flash drive to boot, as the CD drive is dead long time ago.
First, you talk about Mac's with EFI32, but BOOTIA32.EFI is missing, as well as groubia32.efi. Why not to include them into the ISO? I've done that, and the installer starts from USB, though after manual set of the path to grub.cfg. Of course, it goes with "safe graphics" only.
Second, the installer fails at the very end with message like "Can't write grub-efi-32 to /target/", whatever it means. It reports also that the system will not boot because of this error. Nevertheless it reboots and starts with desktop. Then I press "Shutdown" button in the menu and it turns off. And yes, it never boots again, just as it was promised.
So, any help with grubia32 installation would be highly appreciated!
Thank you.
Please help me! I can't create an ISO of Zorin OS lite 16 64bit for my 2006 iMac (Intel core2duo with 32-bit EFI)!
As far as I know, it was officially introduced with the G4 AGP Graphics towers and it was very much something you had the option to do if you had a USB hard drive -- you could access any bootable partition from the option-key menu. Here's a LEM article I found dated 1999 that mentions USB boot.
For some reason, probably relating to USB 2.0, they dropped the option key USB boot starting around 2003ish (my iBook G3 900MHz still has it but my iBook G4 doesn't), but it was still possible from OpenFirmware.
Also, any chance of a torrent? I've been trying to download this for the last few days and every time it gets to 2.16GB, it just sputters out. Literally, it starts for a few seconds, stops for a second, and on until it just totally fails. I'm assuming this is on Google Drive's end, because every other large file I've downloaded so far from other sites have downloaded perfectly fine.
Due to space restrictions on my Google drive I had to temporarily remove them. I will find a better place to upload them as well as make a 22.04 release, however like 20.04 due to my graphics card I will be unable to test, however an upgraded graphics card should fix the issue it's just been a low priority upgrade for me given limited funds and relegating the mac to my child to use.
However, I did notice the original link to the binary wasn't available anymore so I include the copy( iso2mac - Google Drive ) I use so that you can make your own. Just make it executable and run
./iso2mac /path/to/64bit/iso /output/path/isoname.iso
So a year late but interesting to know. I have tried on many different PPC macs and have never been able to get one to boot from OpenFirmware to a USB drive. Not from lack of trying it's just never worked be it a Pismo G3, clamshell iBook G3, iBook G3, iBook G4, powermac G3/4/5, iMac G3/4/5 so might just be bad luck or the drives weren't compatible because I know old computers were finicky with that.
That's why I just always keep an SSD in a FireWire 800 enclosure as any PPC mac will boot from it without issue.
Again sorry I'm a little over a year late but the last year was not a good one for me so didn't have much time to mess around or even think of checking here.
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Please, the liks to download are dead, please update it, thanks so much !
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Welcome @Angelo_JR to the community!
I've gone down this route with my late 2006 iMac 6,1 using Mate 22.04 and am really pleased with how well it works.
Here are what I hope will be some helpful hints, but I must admit that my experience is limited to just this one 32/64 model so my remarks may not be relevant to other Macs of that era.
(1) See attached screen grab for details on how to get the Broadcom WiFi chip and the iSight camera working. These were from Matt Gadient's comments section, but that has been tidied up so unfortunately I can't give the original authors due credit for which I apologise.
The weird thing is that after doing this, the "Additional Drivers" section will say that "This device is not working". Only it is. (shrug).
Darn! It won't allow me embed a screenshot. Let me know if you want the info and we'll work something out.
(2) You need an internet connection to get the WiFi chip working! If plugging in an ethernet cable is not convenient, you can use a phone as a WiFi bridge using USB tethering. Any old phone will work even if it doesn't have a SIM.
(3) You can upgrade to Ubuntu Pro free of charge. This gives 10 years' support. Until 2032 in my case! Not bad for a 2006 computer.
(4) Hacking a USB Stick to boot on this computer following link 1 on Matt's site does work but it's quite complicated. Using a DVD (provided the drive is working) is definitely the simpler option.
(5) If your WiFi hub has a USB socket, but you can't see the USB stick you plugged in to it more in hope than expectation, try this:
Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf
Under the [global] heading add the line
client min protocol = CORE
It worked for me! Didn't even need to reboot
(6) Cracking open the case is admittedly a bit of a performance, but swapping in a new SSD really does speed things up. Bung in a new button cell while you're there.
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Welcome, @frankf to the community!
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