Linux Lite Forums

Hi everyone,

My A1181 Macbook from 2006 has a new 250GB SSD and 2GB (2x1GB) of RAM that I installed prior to trying to run this computer off 32bit Linux Lite v3.8. To my knowledge that meets the minimum requirements to run this version of Linux Lite on this system.

I ordered a USB from the Linux Lite shop, put it in one of the drives, saw that the USB was lighting up red when the system was on, but got a flashing folder icon with a question mark in it. So I restarted the computer and reset the NVRAM, but that got me the same flashing folder icon again. So I rebooted the system again, holding Options so I could change the startup disk to the USB drive, but nothing comes up on the screen. I can see the cursor now but it's against a blank screen.

Should I format the USB to Fat32 and try this again a different way?

Please help! Thank you.

I really hate to be negative about your chances of getting any version of Lite installed on this machine.  Unfortunately there are a number of roadblocks to your desires that I can see:

• based on a an hour or so's googling, installing _any_ Linux distro on intel Mac hardware (especially older Macbooks) requires tenacity, ingenuity, resourcefulness and a great deal of google-fu as easily followed recipes for success appear few and far between and Apple didn't make it easy to do
  
• as far as I can see almost no-one in the Lite community, least of all the developers, has much experience installing _any_ Linux distro on Macs
  
• prior to Lite 4, no Lite UEFI install image (and there were some - see this thread) supported 32bit UEFI for either 32bit or 64bit Lite installs (and 32bit was dropped for Lite 4)
  

That said, if you are intent on continuing your quest (and you will certainly learn a lot by doing so!) you may be able to make use of the following ideas:

• first, find a way to install some other Linux distro for which you can find a reported successfull install with the associated "how it was done" narrative (I've seen references to Mint 17 and Ubuntu 16.04, for example and I'm sure there are others)
  
• once you have some Linux distro running on the machine, you then have a much better chance of being able to successfully install (and maintain) your preferred Linux distro
  
• I came across references to using rEFIt as a UEFI bootloader of which rEFInd is a maintained fork; the rEFInd website also has an extensive collection of UEFI related information
  
• it may be more practical to do much of the installation work with the SSD connected to another machine already running Linux, though some of the formatting may still be best done using MacOS on the machine itself
  

I regret I can't offer more assistance.  I can only wish you all the best in your endeavour, and a request that if you succeed that you attempt to document how you did it (be it in a post here or elsewhere).

Hi, thank you so much for the time you spent on this reply. I will take your advice and will post my documentation if I'm successful. I appreciate it!