I have an iMac model 14,1 which is way past Apple support but works perfectly. I am thinking of running it on Fedora. I have a choice of using OCLP to get it to run newer Apple OS, but I am so sick to death of Apple OS’s, I’d rather run Fedora if I can. Trouble is, I have no clue how to work it out.
I looked on the hardware database and there look to be plenty of probes for the machine : Apple iMac14,1 All in one
The problem is, despite spending a long while reading through them all, I just don’t know what it means, will it run or won’t it?! It seems most things are just “detected”, a few say “working” and a few have the “i” for problem detected. I am not technical enough to understand beyond that, so I really don’t know if the “detected” entires are ‘good’ or not.
I am hoping someone might see this thread and be able to advise how Fedora fares on this iMac.
thanks
I can only share my experience with an even older mac - intel MacBook 5.1 (Aluminum Late 2008): I managed to install Fedora 39 with no issues. The nvidia driver from RPM Fusion didn’t work out for me (graphics card way too old), so I had to stick to the nouveau driver.
After upgrading to F40, I’m experiencing some screen flickering issues, but from what I have seen in the forums, it is probably not a mac-specific issue.
If you are interested in multiple booting, see this topic.
Thanks. I am so stumped by the LHDB. I wish I could interpret the linked page in some sort of rating of ‘usability’. I can’t even see whether each item (bluetooth, wifi etc) will work or not. I guess it’s just a case of suck it and see, but I’ve heard of people using LHDB as a reference before installing but I don’t get how they decipher it!
I don’t want to dual boot but I’ve bookmarked that as I may need to at some point soon. thanks.
PS - Have you heard of OCLP? I just managed to install Sonoma on this old iMac. I can’t believe how easy it was too. All those billions of older apple devices going in skips or landfill because the eco-warrior Apple bosses chose share prices over making good use of good hardware. I have another wonderful old imac I use for business, It’s a 2012 or 2013, but it’s got 32GB Ram, a 2TB SSD I fitted, and a decent i7 processor (and decent graphics). It has YEARS of life left, not a single dead pixel, it can edit 5 hour videos in Final Cut Pro with ease. Yet it’s now ‘out of date’ because someone ‘says so’. Screw that 5hit. I’m gonna put Ventura on it and give it years more use, all with a quick creation of a patched bootable USB installer.
I haven’t heard of OCLP until you have mentioned it. It looks promising. I even thought of starting a new topic/poll over at The Water Cooler, asking for the reasons why someone would install Linux on a Mac (one of the obvious ones being outdated/unsupported hardware, of course).
Regarding your question, if LHDB is not your thing, you might dual boot just to see if it works. In case it does, then you could do a clean install afterwards. You might just consider trying out F39 first, and only afterwards upgrade to F40, since F40 still has issues that might not be Mac-hardware related.
When I installed F39 on my old MacBook, I remember WiFi didn’t work out of the box. I needed to use either a wired connection, or internet sharing via mobile, in order to install the broadcom-wl package from RPM Fusion.
I didn’t test bluetooth though, so I don’t know wether a wireless keyboard/mouse/trackpad would work out of the box.
Yes, good idea. OCLP is new to me, heard about it just a few months ago after selling my macbook pro which i spent years finding (top spec, 2013, MINT). Gutted now as it would have been lovely hardware for a Fedora machine! I’d say using old Apple hardware is one good reason, privacy issues is another, hatred of Apple’s closed walled garden and many other ethical issues could be others. (PRISM program anyone? )
Old ‘unsupported’ Macs can make huge bargains on fleabay. The word ‘unsupported’ is not accurate I now realise, ‘handicapped’ or ‘sabotaged’ may be more accurate. OCLP is a godsend for those who still want Apple OS but can’t afford or don’t want/need newer hardware.
Thanks. I don;t use Wifi, and can live without bluetooth if needed (dongles or just wired is fine here). Broadcom, I remember trying Linux on a macbook years ago and had the same issue.
I noticed F40 is out. Question… is it best to leave it while before jumping on new releases immediately? (I remember always staying behind the curve with Apple OS updates for similar reasons, let the problems iron out). I have finally got a Lenovo Yoga 16" running fairly well on Fedora (after MUCH trouble!), so I am hesitant to leave F39 just yet but wasn’t sure if I was worrying over nothing
Since you ask, and since you have practice in waiting after new releases are out, you might want to wait a couple of weeks before installing/ugrading to F40. With such short release cycles as Fedora’s, I guess it is normal for some things to break, and while there is a really helpful community out here, you would probably need to do some fixing. However, if it is just a spare desktop you want to test out, you could give F40 a try.
Others more experienced here might suggest otherwise.
The LHDB is populated with “probe” results contributed by linux users. These are very helpful, but lack nuance. WiFi and Bluetooth have a wide range of use cases, so there may be drivers that don’t support your use case. 4 GB RAM is very limiting for modern web browsing, and if you still have the original HDD it is very slow by current standards, but if you have a free USB3 port external drives are an option.
I’ve been using Unix/Linux since the 1980’s (Wicat, Ardent, Sun, NeXTStep, RHEL, macOS), and do much of my work with command-line tools. macOS is Unix, and if you use macports then linux may not be a big change.
I have an iMac14,2 with 8GB RAM, that I plan to replace “real soon now ™”. I also have a linux desktop with a nice monitor. Fedora is installed on an external SSD drive, using a 128 GB SSD (pulled from a Windows system that needed more space) in a USB3 case. This is much faster than the internal rotating drive. Apple makes it easy to boot from an external drive (modern PC’s with secure boot requires that you disable secure boot).
I have 8GB in this machine, and a 1TB SSD (my son bought it and spiced it up a bit, then didn’t need it any more )
Yes I get how LHDB works, just wish (much like github) these things were just a bit more accessible to those who don’t write code or understand the ins and outs of tech architecture, firmware etc
I decided to just try a live USB. Fedora Writer on laptop made that easy (what a great tool). I ran a live F39 OS on the iMac and sound working, mic working, camera not sure yet but no biggie if not, bluetooth seems to work (nice!). The only thing I have seen so far that doesn’t is wifi, but I don’t use wifi anyway so no problem there (though i may look into finding drivers to get it working in case I move the machine or take it somewhere).
So… I just installed Fedora and have the ‘completed’ screen in front of me. Have to run out but looking forward to playing with it when I get back to desk. I did manage to get Mac OSX Ventura onto the iMac using OCLP, but in all honesty I just can’t take any more of Apple. Fedora it is, and looks like it may work even better on the iMAc than it did/does on my Lenovo Yoga 16ARP8!
Oh and PS - When i ran Fedora live from USB on the imac - I noticed two warnings in security pane of settings. One said something about secureboot not being in use (i assume that’s a non apple thing so can be ignored), the other message said something I can’t remember but it was something about security risks detected. I will see what is reported now that it’s properly installed on the SSD, just thought I’d mention it. I am assuming I can ignore it but may drop a screenshot to get a second opinion. thanks again
Glad the iMac is working for your needs. Secure boot came along relatively recently – see What is Secure Boot and How Does It Work. This is very important for cubicle farms were many people have access to workstations, but not as much for most home systems. Years ago there was an incident at my work where a laptop infected with malware was detected by the network management system. Turned out a contractor repairing pipes had connected a pump controller laptop to the network in order to play games.
Modern linux systems collect massive amounts of detail that you can view using journactl in a terminal. It does take some effort to filter out messages that aren’t relevant to a particular issue. There are many examples of journalctl filters in this forum.
If you are not familiar with POSIX command-line tools (shell, pipes, ls, cat, etc.), I recommend Linux Command. Solving issues with linux often requires use of command-line tools, and the internet is increasing polluted with shoddy rehashes of older references reworked so they will be highlighted in web searches.
Make sure the Mac’s firmware is up-to-date (it’s easier to do that from macOS), write Fedora to a USB drive (dd), power off the Mac, plug the drive in, and I think hold some button while powering the Mac back on to get to a boot selection screen. Fedora on the USB should appear there, and it’s a matter of selecting it, going through the install process, and rebooting. That was generally how it went on a MBP 2010, 2014, and some iMac I had with ATI graphics.
I wouldn’t trust feature lists as they get outdated, and on older hardware I doubt anyone is rushing to test new modern distros on outdated hardware. It’s easier to boot a Fedora LiveUSB and try the stuff. Looking at that hardware database and some of the hardware mentioned for 14,1 iMacs, it all looks standard and supported no problem.
I didn’t read most of the posts after the first one though and it sounds like everything went well!
The security warnings in that panel are from fwupd and they have what’s called HSI levels to report how secure a computer is. If you don’t have Secure Boot on UEFI, it assumes you’re insecure and you can’t even pass HSI 1.
If you’re trying to intentionally lock down your machine with the works (IOMMU, pre-boot DMA protection, BIOS and HDD passwords), that panel becomes sort of relevant but imo you’re better off getting specifics from command-line or the technical report to see what exactly needs to be changed. If you’re just using your computer and don’t need it 100% locked-down with physical access, that whole panel can be ignored (but you can check the Technical report to see if there’s anything you can mess with if curious; can probably add mem_sleep_default=s2idle to pass both of the Suspend checks, and intel_iommu=on for the IOMMU check and possibly pre-boot DMA prot).
Two superb posts above, thanks both of you.
Well I am finding it a breeze so far, just setting things up how I like them, but so far I can’t find any hardware not working!
2 quick questions:
Is it possible to have KDE desktop environment installed at the same time as Gnome? I’d quite like to try it, if not I can build an installer (think it’s called a ‘spin’). thanks
I see Fedora 40 is out now. I am hesitant, since it’s all going so swimmingly on 39! Any reason to hold off or should I just go for it and hold breath?!
I also tried the OCLP and it worked, but 2 days later I started having hangs, and crashes on some apps or even the system apps. I gave up on it and went back to catalina or what the hell it was…
Today Installed fedora silverblue and trying to assemble a plexserver and nas for backing up data, keeping the “screen off” by accessing it remotely.
Everything works in fedora, I am just seeing unusual fan speeds… trying to solve it by installing some fan control software. …
LInux is great, fedora/genome my prefered mix… but boy… prepare for reading, and LEARNING a lot of new concepts.
As I wen with silverblue, I am now getting the need to learn how containerized apps work, a nd the likes of docker or Podman to put the plex server to work. Not a simple thing… but hey… never stop learning… that’s my motto.
I do’nt envy that learning! Sounds like yo’ure making good progress there, Fedora is the new love of my life and despite some bits and bobs that work strangely, or in some rare cases don’t work (or at least not in a way that works for me, COLUMNS in FILES APP PLEEEEAASSEE!), it’s still a huge breath of fresh air after leaving the increasingly stifling, snobby, overpriced and privacy invasive Apple walled garden.
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