MEPIS Community Forum

I just installed Lubuntu 12.04 on Mom's old iMac 5,1...and it works fairly well, but the fans never come on. (It's possible it hasn't gotten hot enough.)

I saw a blog post ( http://www.squidoo.com/the-best-linux-distribution-for-macs) that said that MEPIS is the "best" linux distro for Mac.

Can anyone confirm that MEPIS "fully" supports the Mac hardware--more specifically my 6-year-old, 5,1 (Intel, 64bit, 2GB RAM) iMac?

Thanks in advance!

We'll have to wait for someone to post that uses a Mac but in the meantime I wanted to point out that the developer uses a Mac to develop Mepis.

Warren Woodford, the creator of MEPIS, uses a Mac as his development machine.
I can't absolutely guarantee your hardware is compatible but it's highly likely that it is.

Macintoshes use a fairly restricted subset of the available x86 hardware with one criterion being that they have good drivers in BSD. Virtually anything with a good BSD driver has a good Linux one as well. That leaves the system boot issue which shouldn't differ much from Mac to Mac - and you know Warren's got it configured to handle that.

Welcome, and good luck!

Yes.

Any IA-32/x86-64 compiled /Linux will run on an IA-32/x86-64 Apple System.

Apple Systems with POWER architecture chips, such as the G3, G4, and G5, require a /Linux compiled to PowerPC targets. These Apple Power systems are the ones that are not compatible with the Mepis Debian/Linux releases.

Thanks for the peppy replies... I'll have to try it out this weekend. My main concern is that the fans are controllable--or at least will come on when necessary.

I had upgraded the machine to Lion, but it was horribly laggy. I downgraded it back to Snow Leopard, and it's MUCH more responsive. Wanted to compare it to Linux speeds (just for fun).

Look forward to trying it out! :-) Thanks!

After reading the link, it left me with a frown and a big question mark in my brain. I have 4 Macbooks and have loaded M11, along with many other distros on them. The first thing that is needed to
even read a Linux cd on a Apple, is a boot loader to be installed to be able to read it. I just downloaded rEFlt from their web site and loaded it under the Apple OS. I did know that WW has
a OSX folder on the ISO, I will have to give that a look at and see if there are any goodies there.

My oldest Macbook is a 13" core duo, all Intel inside. It is a bit newer than your IMac and Linux should run okay on it. The biggies problems areas I ran into is getting the trackpad to work
right(you do not have one), the Intel video chip and the Intel sound chip. With the Macbooks, Apple likes to change things inside with each newer model, like video and audio chips. So with
my newer models the trackpad and blue tooth are the sticky points under Linux.

Also, the Ubuntu forums also has a Apple only board index which may be helpful, as well as posting here.

Do not be shy, set your system up to dual boot and give Mepis a run.