Tag: macbook

Install Ubuntu on a old Mac

I have a old MacBook Pro, from around 2013. This stable old laptop have been wonderful. Sadly support for this machine ended long time ago, so why not test something different?

I’ve used Linux on laptops at work before, and for coding and working it is ok. My machine have a Intel CPU and 8GB of memory, so modern Ubuntu should work decent. My first try failed hard, downloading the newest Ubuntu Desktop, it just gave me a black screen after booting from the usbdrive.

Well, after a lot of googling someone mentioned a legacy installer, and this did the trick. The newest version of Ubuntu with this is 23.10.1, but you can do the usual upgrade and I’m now running 25.10 on my machine.

The download link for this is https://mirror.ucu.ac.ug/ubuntu-cdimage/releases/23.10.1/release/ubuntu-23.10-desktop-legacy-amd64.iso

Good luck running Ubuntu on your old Mac 🙂

MacBook Pro, what OS? A Journey

My mac

I got an old MacBook Pro, Apple calls it Retina, 13-inches, late 2013.

This machine has never stopped surprising me, still performing well, and has been abused with different OS’s lately.
Parrot OS and Kubuntu are the latest, but it didn’t feel right, mostly because of keyboard setup bugs.

So I thought why not try osX again, and this was not easy.
I did the CMD+R when booting, and ended up with some old version. After installing it I tried downloading the latest version of osX, but I did get some kind of error(yes my machine is too old). Well, I could install El Capitan… So I tried that.

Well, after some downloading I got this error: no packages were eligible for install. Yes.. it seems like it is a date issue and I was able to fix this with the help of this thread: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/394259/mac-stuck-in-el-capitan-installer-loop-no-packages-were-eligible-for-install
Some tinkering with the date, and some boots later I finally was able to start El Captian. Then after googling how to install Big Sur(yes this is the newest version of macOS this MacBook pro supports) I somehow found the link that opened App Store.

Oh, I wasn’t done… Filevault needed to do its thing first. And that took around 30 min. And then there was another 30 min to install it.

Have to say that everything isn’t easier with Apple stuff… But in the end I guess I was kind of updated?!