Install Ubuntu 14.04 on Macbook Air 11 6,1
I am so excited to report that after a long time of trying every distribution under the sun, I was finally able to install Ubuntu 14.04 on my beloved Macbook Air. I absolutely love this laptop, but was disappointed that I was stuck in OS X. I am a huge fan of Apple Hardware, and it is my personal opinion that the Macbook Air is the perfect laptop. However, I have never been a huge fan of OS X because it takes all of the fun out of UNIX. Below are the steps I followed. The install process is pretty straightforward. I had to dual boot because no matter how many different guides I followed I was not able to get the Macbook Air to single boot with Ubuntu. I probably reinstalled OS X three or four times before I finally gave up and decided to dual boot. The 20~ GB of Hard Drive space that I lose is well worth being able to finally run Linux on this laptop. In addition, most guides recommend keeping OS X laying around somewhere in case apple decides to release some firmware update that is required for future operation of this device.
Steps to Install Ubuntu 14.04 on Macbook Air
- Download Refind
- Open up Terminal.App and issue the following commands to install Refind
cd Downloads/refind-bin-0.8.0 && sudo sh install.sh
- Open up Disk Utility, Select the Macintosh HD, and make two additional partitions. I took out 80GB for Linux and 4GB for Swap (I have a 128GB SSD). It does not matter what file system type you use here because we are going to change it using the installer later.
- Download [Ubuntu 14.04 64 Bit][2] and make a [bootable USB][3].
- Plug in the USB and reboot your Macbook Air
- You should boot into ReFind, if not reboot again.
- From ReFind select Boot EFIBOOTgrubx64.efi
- Select Install Ubuntu from GRUB
- Go through the installer with all defaults. When you get to the part where it asks you where you would like to install Ubuntu select Something Else. Your Partition should look something like this:
- EFI Partition (From Mac)
- Mac HD Partition (From Mac)
- Swap (I made this 4 GB )
- Ubuntu (I made this 80 GB using ext4 as the file system)
- Continue through the installer choosing the rest of the default values.
- Once Ubuntu installs, the computer will reboot. When it comes back to life select Boot EFIubuntugrubx64.efi
I could not be happier that Ubuntu finally works on my Macbook Air! Please let me know in the comments if you run into any issues with this install.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on mastodon or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Dagger Feels Like Magic
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- 20 Years of Ubuntu
- видно по глазам - you can see it in the eyes
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Serendipity from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Andrea Veri: GNOME Infrastructure migration to AWS from Planet GNOME
- A Whale of a Time from https://popagandhi.com/
- Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Sahil Dhiman: 25, A Quarter of a Century Later from Planet Debian
- Reflections on Palantir from Nabeel S. Qureshi
- Reading Old Posts from Kev Quirk
- Capture less than you create from David Heinemeier Hansson
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Script Doctoring
I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autist…
via Bix Dot Blog October 22, 2024Blockchain company Forte acquires games studios, demands secrecy, shuts them down
Sometime in 2023, blockchain firm Forte acquired game studios Phoenix Labs and Rumble Games. However, it would be a year before this came to light, because according to a report from Game Developer, Forte demanded secrecy from employ…
via Web3 is Going Just Great October 22, 2024Initial explorations of Anthropic's new Computer Use capability
Two big announcements from Anthropic today: a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and a new API mode that they are calling computer use. (They also pre-announced Haiku 3.5, but that's not available yet so I'm ignoring it until I can try it out myself.) Comp…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries October 22, 2024Generated by openring