I have a macbook of 2012 (?) vintage, that will boot Mint from a USB drive. It does have a working version of MacOS install (10.15 I think). I think at some point Macs stopped being "fussy" about how they booted and became more like PCs in that they used "standard" BIOS/Boot logic.
At Sun, 31 May 2026 22:01:37 -0400 [email protected] wrote: > > On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 2:53â¯PM Paul Duncan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > My 15 year old son has found an old 2011 iMac in the side of the road. Long > > story short is that the processor probably works, but we think the GPU is > > dead as we cannot get video out of the mini display port connector, or the > > screen. > > > > So, I would like to boot from a Debian live ISO with the following kernel > > parameters (set in grub.cfg). > > > > console=ttyUSB0,19200n8 > > > > Now, I can mount up the ISO in loop mode, and get into grub.cfg, but how do > > I write this back to the ISO so that I can put in on a USB flash drive? > > I'm not sure about your technical problems. Usually you need a > blessed Apple partition to boot an old Mac. I also seem to recall you > may need to boot to a CD rather than a USB device on some models. I > have a PowerMac G5 that needs to boot like that (CD instead of USB). > > But you will find the folks who keep the old PowerMac's alive at the > debian-powerpc mailing list > (<https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/>). Many folks on the list > are fanatics, and they can probably answer all your questions (and > more). > > Jeff > > > -- Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364 Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services [email protected] -- Webhosting Services
