[WIP] Lubuntu on Mac

wxl · January 17, 2025, 12:07am

STATE OF THIS DOCUMENT: work in progress

Initial draft done, enough to make an installation happen. Using that system will reveal the other tips and tricks I hope to include here.

Feel free to add to this if you already have some experience. One of the things that would be nice to add would be to list your particular model if you have successfully installed Lubuntu. I’ve started a table to that end.

Background

From 1994-2005, Apple computers had PowerPC chips¹. This was supported by Ubuntu for a while but has since gone by the wayside. Then they switched briefly to Intel 32 bit chips. Again, supported by Ubuntu for a while, but no longer. So there’s nothing we can do about any of those.

However, they had 64 bit Intel chips in 2006. It wasn’t until 2020 that we saw the first Apple computers with their own chips². In 2023, the last Intel device from Apple (Mac Pro) was discontinued.

Worse yet, many— if not most— of these 64-bit Intel Macs cannot run a currently maintained version of macOS.

What does this all mean? There is more than a quarter century worth of expensive computers that need something other than macOS to keep running.

So I’d like to create a little documentation to provide tips and tricks to put Lubuntu on your Mac.

Documentation

Booting the image

No special image is needed. Just grab the image and burn it to installation media like normal. In Lubuntu, Startup Disk Creator (usb-creator-kde) is ideal for this.

The tricky part with Macs is accessing the boot menu. To do this, hold down the Option key (which should be the left Alt key on non-Apple keyboards) while pressing the power button. If that doesn’t work, try tapping on the key after the boot chime.

Before you see the Apple logo, the boot menu will show available devices to boot. You may want to get to the boot menu first and then insert your installation media.

At the boot menu, you can also set up WiFi, but this will not be retained when you boot the image, so don’t bother with it.

Make sure to avoid using Bluetooth input devices. If they aren’t already paired, there’s no way to pair from the boot menu. Also, any pairing you’ve already done won’t be known by the boot image, so you will have to pair again. Of course, that’s rather hard if you have no input devices. Wireless devices that communicate directly with a USB receiver rather than Bluetooth direct to the computer are known to work, such as the ones that Logitech uses with 2.4GHz wireless.

Advanced topics

If you want to keep your macOS partition, you’ll likely need to do some creative partitioning. Since the whole point behind this document is to deal with instances of insecure and unsupported macOS versions, we’re not inclined to suggest you continue to use it!

Successful installs

form factor	subfamily	order #	model #	EMC #	model ID	latest supported macOS	Lubuntu version	notes
iMac (Late 2009)	Mid-2010	MC508LL/A	A1311	2389	iMac11,2	10.13	24.10	whole disk install with encryption; no Apple peripherals used

Note that these different identifying numbers are not necessarily unique (order number usually is), so providing as much of them as possible is helpful. If it’s not reasonable to add them, please provide as much information on the specification as possible, as that can help narrow down the specific machine.

See here for advice to get the serial number which in turn can be used to lookup the rest of the information at everymac.com.

That lookup will also tell you the latest supported version, but read the notes. The version shown is the latest version in which all features are supported. The notes will show the latest version that will run at all. List that one. Don’t list anything that requires patches, hardware modifications, or any other hacking to install. Note at time of writing that the currently maintained versions are 13 and above. If the number is below that, then the machine cannot safely run macOS, at least not while connected to the Internet.