2008 white Macbook 4,1 - realistic expectations?

[Argyboy]

Thanks, I’ll give that a look.
For the record it has a spinning hdd, 3 go ram and no OS X partition. 500mb efi partition and the remaining allocated space is ubuntu

It seems that the older Intel graphics chip in these machines causes issues with the newer Linux kernels so you need to add that boot parameter I mentioned. If that doesn't help, I'd probably go to the Ubuntu forums for some help!

 

[kge420]

Pretty good. You might need to set a new boot parameter if you're having a very long boot time. Check this out:

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=47348

Make sure the relevant line looks like this:


GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=SVIDEO-1:d"

Then, run sudo update-grub and reboot. See if its any better.

That worked perfectly. Boot went from 6:30 to 1:23
Thanks for the help.
Off now to get the WiFi sorted. Have the proprietary drivers but can’t seem to enable the airport card.
Again, thanks a lot.

 

[Argyboy]

That worked perfectly. Boot went from 6:30 to 1:23
Thanks for the help.
Off now to get the WiFi sorted. Have the proprietary drivers but can’t seem to enable the airport card.
Again, thanks a lot.

No worries! Glad it helped. Just as an extra FYI, i got wifi working on this MacBook 2008 on MX Linux without any tweaks needed. Nice solid distro based on Debian Stable with updated packages - quite a high flier in the Linux world at the moment.

The XFCE desktop is a bit old now but give it a whirl if you fancy it.

https://mxlinux.org/

Happy Linux-ing!

 

[kge420]

No worries! Glad it helped. Just as an extra FYI, i got wifi working on this MacBook 2008 on MX Linux without any tweaks needed. Nice solid distro based on Debian Stable with updated packages - quite a high flier in the Linux world at the moment.

The XFCE desktop is a bit old now but give it a whirl if you fancy it.

https://mxlinux.org/

Happy Linux-ing!

I don’t have my heart set on any particular distro so I’ll definitely give this a go.

 

[kge420]

No worries! Glad it helped. Just as an extra FYI, i got wifi working on this MacBook 2008 on MX Linux without any tweaks needed. Nice solid distro based on Debian Stable with updated packages - quite a high flier in the Linux world at the moment.

The XFCE desktop is a bit old now but give it a whirl if you fancy it.

https://mxlinux.org/

Happy Linux-ing!

@Argyboy, been using MXLinux now for a while. Runs very well on this MacBook 4,1. Installed an ssd last week and boot time is down to 45 seconds. I have 2-2gb sticks of ram coming. That will be all as far as upgrades go. I will use this exclusively for my model railroad.
To anyone looking for a good running machine at a relatively low cost pick one of these up, or pull it out of the closet and give this setup a try.