Two days ago my Purism laptop stopped working: As soon as the boot process tried to access the SDD, it would shut down.
I started wondering about bringing the old MacBook Pro back to life. We had stopped using it after my wife bought a new Mac. This seemed like the best solution at the time. She only wanted a system where there was at least a chance of getting decent support from friends or shops, i.e. Windows or macOS. And we didn't want to continue using the MacBook Pro because Apple had decided to no longer support those machines with macOS updates.
I always felt bad about having a perfectly usable laptop sitting around that I had used myself for so long before buying the Purism laptop. But now that the Purism laptop was out of order and my wife had moved to a new laptop, I started wondering about installing Debian on the MacBook Pro.
@j12i@weirder.earth suggested that I might just try to plug the USB stick with the Debian installer into the Mac since the chip architecture was compatible. I tried that, and it worked!
Then @j12i@weirder.earth had an even strange idea:
If it physically fits, you could even try the drive from the librem in the macbook. Should only need fixing up the bootloader, if at all.
And so it was!
The SDD plugged into the MacBook Pro was mounted correctly by the rescue system on the stick. I reinstalled GRUB on /dev/sda and after a reboot I was running Debian on the MacBook Pro!
Everything seems a bit slow, but this is definitely workable. What a great idea!
I installed `firmware-b43-installer` in order to get the wireless card to run. The wireless card is a BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01). Broadcom is such a sadface.
I decided that perhaps Gnome was slow and I should go and try sway again. I installed `gpomme` for the Apple hotkeys (change display brightness, change volume) but then I couldn't get the trackpad to invert the y-axis and I'm back to Gnome…
A bit later, I figured that perhaps the input source detection wasn't working so I mashed it all together, and now it works!
input * {
dwt enabled
tap enabled
natural_scroll enabled
middle_emulation disabled
xkb_layout us
xkb_variant altgr-intl
xkb_options compose:caps
}
It's still looking good. The camera seems to be working, too.
#Administration #Debian #Apple #Mac
And I noticed a few things, too: