The tasks was for me to wipe the hard drives for a relative and then we could keep them.
I am not that familiar with Macs but it didn't take long to figure out how to do a DOD highest level of a disk wipe.
So now I wanted to reinstall Mac OS X. That seemed easy enough. But I was getting the temporarily unavailable warning. That led me down a rabbit whole and even a call to Mac support. Which I was told to take it to a Mac store to get an OS on it.
Well that didn't bode to well with me considering I am a Unix engineer and work with Linux mostly. Nevertheless I kept on trying. Ultimately it seemed like the macbooks I had could only have OS X Lion on them and I could buy the OS for $20 from Apple.
That doesn't seem too bad but then I would be stuck the an old version of OS X.
So I laid to for bed and I thought to myself. Why not try Ubuntu on them.
That's what I did the next day. I read some from someones sight and Ubuntu's site.
Well I sort of put them together and had to come up with my own process.
- My macbooks didn't have DVD ROM.
- Booting from USB wasn't working.
But they did have CD Roms. So I had to think outside the box a little.
The first macbook was 64 bit 4GB of ram so I opted for Ubuntu 18.04
Since I only had CD ROMs I had to use the minimal.iso
Here are some other download options. I used 16.04 32 bit on another.
I booted, held down option key, and then I had the option to choose windows or efi. I choose efi and away it went.
You can pick which flavor of Ubuntu you want. I choose lubuntu on this one to just to try it out. I plugged it into the network with a cat5 cable. Once it was booted up and had to do some special stuff to get the wifi working.
Let me dig up that info. Okay so this isn't exactly what I did but it's pretty darn close.
Here is what I did.
sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and added at the end of the file.
blacklist wl
blacklist bcm43xx
