{"id":1800,"date":"2015-08-26T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/?p=1800"},"modified":"2021-06-07T18:53:56","modified_gmt":"2021-06-07T22:53:56","slug":"linux-and-a-macbook-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/?p=1800","title":{"rendered":"Linux and a MacBook Pro"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, I received a package in the mail from a mysterious benefactor<\/a>. It contained two pieces of tech that were old, outdated, and abandoned. The first was a 17″ MacBook Pro<\/a>, part of the first generation released with Intel processors.<\/p>\n

It was missing a battery, but otherwise worked. An old (and now known to be insecure) version of Mac OS X booted up and hummed along. The screen, once cleaned, was magnificent, even without being “retina.” I had plenty of uses for this – a computer for Cian, a computer to work on or putz around with when I was in the living room, a school computer for my brother-in-law… in the end, I decided on making it a kid\/guest computer for the living room. Aidan had lost the privilege of having a computer in his room, Cian wasn’t ready for his own yet, and many guests have borrowed Nikki’s or my laptop when they were over.<\/p>\n

This laptop just<\/em> missed the compatibility cut-off for OS X Yosemite<\/a>, and I wasn’t going to leave a known insecure OS on it. The same incompatibility ruled out 64-bit operating systems in general, but its max of 3GB of RAM made that a moot point. So, I installed 32-bit Edubuntu<\/a> on it, and it ran fairly well, as long as I avoided the Unity desktop<\/a>. Still sometimes Firefox<\/a> would chug or Minecraft<\/a> would stutter – forget trying to play it in full screen.<\/p>\n

I still felt like the OS was doing injustice to the machine, so I kept looking. My memory upgrade (to the full 3GB) came in, and improved things, but I was still dissatisfied. I had much better memories of this class of machine. there’s not a whole lot of info out there about old Macs and Linux shacking up together, but I stumbled on two distros that I hadn’t played with in a while: Bodhi<\/a> and Xubuntu<\/a>. (Xubuntu is really just XFCE<\/a> on top of Ubuntu<\/a>, so not really<\/em> its own distro, but whatever.)<\/p>\n

While I dug Bodhi’s goal and vision, it felt clunky and counter-intuitive. The laptop’s graphics capability seemed ignored, and I just didn’t like it. Xubuntu was the exact opposite. It was smooth, though long to boot, and had a simple and straightforward implementation of XFCE. Things were intuitive; they just worked. Firefox flew when compared to running in Edubuntu, as did Minecraft.<\/p>\n

Full screen runs like a dream!<\/p>\n

So, I settled on Xubuntu, and I haven’t been sorry. The younger boys play Minecraft on it (and Acelyn is already asking to try), browsing is fully-functional and quick (even on YouTube<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>), and it stores nicely under the couch, to be set on the coffee table when in use. No battery needed!<\/p>\n

Thanks again to the mysterious benefactor, and wherever\/whoever he got this from. It’s got a good home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, I received a package in the mail from a mysterious benefactor. It contained two pieces of tech that were old, outdated, and abandoned. The first was a 17″ MacBook Pro, part of the first generation released … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-gadgets-and-nerdery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paQnES-t2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1801,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcrampton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}