Playing with old mac computers

My 2008 iMac had a flashing lock symbol on it when I turned it on.

Using results from here, here, and here, I fixed it! (Well, kind of. It didn't work with El Cap., but worked with Mavericks). After about a year or finding "solutions" online not to work, this is all it took? (In my defence, I either have a faulty option key to bring up the start menu, or a fault USB port). (I also couldn't recall the password for a while, but I remember it now that it doesn't matter anymore).

Now that is has been so long, I wonder if I should install linux?


Note from the future: these macadmin-scripts are a really great tool to download old Apple Operating Systems, as Apple tries extremely hard not to let you downgrade a machine, and even makes the OS downloads quite tricky...


After wondering for a long time whether or not I should install Linux on this old iMac, I decided I want to...

I wrote some notes on Linux on the 17th October, 2019:

While I was playing with these distributions, and operating systems, and gettting a better understanding of using the command line, I wrote a very enamoured note about package managers, because I couldn't believe how easy it was to manage everything with the help of them.

I also found this helpful for making a bootable drive (but more on that later, as this is what I used to make the El Cap. bootable drives!):

sudo /Applications/install-sys.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/disk-vol --applicationpath /Ammplications/install-sys.app --nointeration

I have tried (and failed) using this method found here. I also tried using Etcher.io, but it didn't work.

Note: see a later blog post from 2nd November, to see a good method of making bootable drives for Linux OS's, on a Mac.


A funny turn of events: after, on 24th October, 2019, I tried installing OS X Lion on my 2007 MacBook. It didn't have anough RAM. It needed 2 GB...


After getting my 2002 iMac, I tried to get OS Tiger. I found it here and downloaded Tiger_4_6.dmg_.zip. I also found a Snow Leopard install for my 2008 iMac, which worked!

To get Ruby worjing on my old iMac, I had to run

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable && source ~/.rvm/scripts && rvm install 2.2.3 --disable-binary && brew install icu4c cmake pkg-config

I decided (based on notes from 3rd November, 2019) that I would install Linux on my 2008 iMac. I tried fedora, and using this and this, I managed to install the correct drivers for my BCM4321 interface, and get WiFi working!

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