System freezes during the installation on an iMac 9.1

The system freezes during the installation of manjaro-xfce-21.1.6-211017-linux513.iso on an iMac 9.1 (2009, Intel Core2 Duo E8135, Nvidia C97 GeForce 9700) at about 78%. When booting from the usb-stick I am not shown the selection of drivers. In life mode everything seems to work.
Please help

Mac hardware are notorious difficult - and usually only works well with macOS.

It is rather confusing when something works while booting the ISO but becomes unstable or dysfunctional at a later point.

Try dumping the kernel command line when the system is booted to a working state.

The commandline can prove useful in the later troubleshooting of issues.

cat /proc/cmdline

If the system’s network connection is up - you can share the link generated by this command

cat /proc/cmdline  | curl -F 'f:1=<-' ix.io

Thanks for the tips. The cmdline shows the expected regarding the drivers.

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-x86_64 lang=en_US keytable=us tz=UTC misobasedir=manjaro misolabel=MANJARO_XFCE_2116 quiet systemd.show_status=1 apparmor=1 security=apparmor driver=free nouveau.modeset=1 i915.modeset=1 radeon.modeset=1

A ct article made it seem that with manjaro it is easy to give new life to the old Mac. I have now also tried with mint, there I get further. However, the system is unstable and freezes when using browsers. Possibly a problem with the driver nouveau and NVidia, so what else than freezing when installing manjaro.

I currently dual boot macOS Monterey and Manjaro KDE Plasma 21.1.6 on my mid 2015 MacBook Pro. I do not have any issues with the install, albeit I do have an AMD Radeon card. When you boot from the USB stick select to boot with proprietary drivers When you do the install it will install the nVidia drivers automatically. I did this with my Lenovo Yoga 15 with an nVidia card and had no issues. I see that you said you do not get a selection, I am wondering if there is an issue with the ISO you setup. I have always seen this choice on Manjaro ISO’s.

I changed 2 things and was able to install manjaro21.1.6.

  • the 1st attempt I did with a stick created with dd, now I created one with etcher. according to sha256sum they are different, on the Pc is not noticeable difference.
  • on both attempts the iMac was on the net via ethernet, on the 1st attempt i also logged on via wifi to test.

The installed system is unstable, it freezes often when I work in the browser. Sometimes the cursor disappears or does not move, also the keyboard. But with the power switch comes delayed the menu and I can continue working.

My hypothesis: nouveau and NVidia are probably responsible for the freezing and the very first message I see comes from systemd, the selection before does not appear. At least for wlan the closed source wl driver was installed instead of the free b43… driver.
No idea what I can do to make the selection menu come on boot.

Now I will try to install the nvidia driver, maybe then the system will be more stable.

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