Need to temporarily move my drive to an old Mac

[spacecase-25]

Yup, it does seem like the move luckily I was able to find a wireless mouse too… wasn’t sure I had a spare anywhere.

Thanks for your help!

Unfortunately the battery is completely dead, so that should be fun with a magnetic charger hahaha

[spacecase-25]

I may still mess around with the older machine tho. I unmarked the thread as “solve” on the off chance someone has the secret to getting the older machine to work, otherwise the thread would lock and even marked as solved no one will give it a look.

The desire for that sweet, sweet hit of nostalgia is strong… there’s just something about those old PowerBook / PowerBook-looking machines that is just so cool to me.

[spacecase-25]

It’s super interesting that both GPUs show up… it never did that when I was daily driving this machine. You could get the AMD card under BIOS and the iGPU under efi boot. I’ve heard tales that hybrid graphics had gotten a lot of work, and that appears to be true!

[soundofthunder]

@spacecase-25

The desire for that sweet, sweet hit of nostalgia is strong… there’s just something about those old PowerBook / PowerBook-looking machines that is just so cool to me.

Ah, but some simply swap the innards for something more Intel-compatible - quite popular for a while, too, as those machines were typically available for $100-$200 on eBay.

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That sounds like an absolute project lmao… I’ll admit it would be neat tho. I’ve seen folks do it with the old PowerMacs, but never a laptop. That would be wild.

I think, first, I will worry about swapping the innards of my Thinkpad with inndards that work

And as a little bonus, I found a 1TB WD drive in the newer Mac… I may put that into the old one and do a proper install over the weekend (after all the other things I need to get done)

[soundofthunder]

@spacecase-25

It’s super interesting that both GPUs show up… it never did that when I was daily driving this machine. You could get the AMD card under BIOS and the iGPU under efi boot. I’ve heard tales that hybrid graphics had gotten a lot of work, and that appears to be true!

Neofetch is no longer being updated. Fastfetch seems to be the current goto (it’s in the repo’s) - you might like to switch to that (after all the other things).

Cheers.

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Yeah, that’s a thing. I may check it out, but neofetch is just bash script so it should keep working for quite a while. I’m so used to typing it that I’ll probably keep using it until it stops working

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I feel like I’m so close to getting the older Macbook to boot. I found a tool called Super Grub2 (SG2), which has a 32bit version. I flash that onto a USB stick and boot from that. Now here’s where things get a bit tricky.

SG2 finds all the .efi files on the ESP partition, however none of them boot. SG2 also allows me to decrypt the LUKS drive, at which point it is able to see my grub.cfg (this being on the encrypted root partition). If I try to boot the “Manjaro” entry, the proper Manjaro GRUB screen appears (this is already far more than I was able to achieve previously), but things go wrong when it tries to set the encrypted drive as root and boot from it… My assumption here is that this is because the drives are already encrypted, where as when booting normally they would still be encrypted at this point.

So I’m thinking that I either need to manually edit the menuentry so that it will work with the already unencrypted drives, or I can get to a grub rescue prompt via a 32bit .efi file I dropped on the drive (however this will not pick up the grub.cfg file for some reason) and maybe figure out how to boot from there… tho I have no idea how to use the grub rescue prompt, and from the searches I’ve done so far, I have not been successful.

I think my next move will be to copy my grub.cfg file to a partition that SG2 can read before decrypting and seeing if that “Manjaro” entry shows up…

Again, always open to others’ insight and experience

SG2 also displays all the individual kernel files it finds, but those will not booth either.

EDIT: I got one of these kernel entries to “boot” by adding nomodesetting, but by that I mean it got to “waiting for drive ” and just sat there after loading up some udev events

[soundofthunder]

These might be of interest (and more likely to be successful); except using Debian (or Arch) rather than Manjaro (for the Old Mac):

• MacBook 2.1 (Pro information page wasn’t available)
• Install 32bit Linux on Mac
• Linux Distributions You Can Rely on for Your Ancient 32-bit Computer

I suggest these only for the old Mac project rather than for your current Manjaro disk.

Cheers.