Ubuntu 24.04 on an EXTREMELY Minimal Mac 

Go to bit.ly/4aCuT5P for the incredible Autofull M6 Gaming Chair!

Someone at Canonical must still be rocking that machine for their workstation. They will give it up kicking and screaming 😂

That Mac Mini may be old enough to drive but it'd not be very safe. It's got terrible iSight.

An interesting PC without Haiku? Who are you and what did you do to Sean?!

I'm running 24.04 on an old iMac from 2007. Changed the HDD to an SSD (that was a fun exercise). Runs smooth as butter for daily use.

I like the mac mini form factor. They are nice and stackable.

Surprising, how a 2024 operating system can be ran on an old minimal 2009 mac mini, especially with the GNOME shell.

I would not use the snap version of Steam. Valve said to use the official deb or even the flatpak, as there are reports of catastrophic bugs from the snap version.

If you add the nvidia-legacy PPA, you should be able to install the nvidia-340 drivers for your GPU. Officially, nVidia driopped support for the 9600 a while ago, but the community maintains patches for the kernel module to let it work with newer kernel versions.

These games were running through XWayland which has synchronization issues on NVIDIA causing flickering.

I half expected to see Wolfenstein.

The reason it took so long to boot the live image is because you're limited to USB 2.0 speeds, as USB 3 didn't come out until 2011

Picked one of these up back in ‘09 for use with the living room TV as a DVD player, retro game emulation station, and hub to store and play digital media. With a 1080p screen, it was PERFECT. I still have it setup with Snow Leopard, all my ROMs, and a front end launcher to make for a seamless “console” experience. It’s easy to forget how fast Snow Leopard boots (especially on an SSD), and thinking about digging out one of my old CRTs and fashioning a retro arcade cabinet with this very machine. Hard to believe this kind of machine is already so retro! Great coverage, as always!

Gotta love the x86-64 architecture.

There's something really charming about these old Mac Minis I swear. If Ubuntu is too much for it, Xubuntu is probably still perfectly fine on it.

Great Video. I've historically struggled with Linux (as I'm a total novice). But after seeing your video, I gave it a go with my 2011 Mac Mini and it worked perfectly! Thanks Sean! Love your vids... Keep up the great work.

I always put really lightweight distros on these old Macs, like Artix. A lightweight distro with a desktop manager like KDE makes these little things seem like modern lower end computers. I use a 2014 Mac Mini as an SMB server, but it certainly can do more than that!

Love that design. I've got a 2006 Mini. Served me well for quite some time.

3:33 "Fiiiine Corinthian Leaaaather!"

I have a 2010 Mac Mini I upgraded to the hilt - 240GB SSD, 8GB RAM, and it's got a decent Core 2 Duo onboard with nVidia 320M graphics. It's not a bad little machine at all and the unibody form factor with a DVD drive is really neat. I wish they made M series Macs with blu-ray drives, that would be cool! There's plenty of space in there for one these days...

1:41 Ah, yes, back when putting enough ports on a Mac was acceptable! 😂

I liked this form of the Mac Mini best, had the first gen PPC one and loved it.

I'm running Zorin 17.1 on the very next model of Mac Mini (4,1) and it runs silky smooth, almost like it was made for the computer. It's amazing how a brand new operating system can breathe life into an old system.

Great video, that was my very first Mac. It was touted as Apple's first sub $500 computer, I believed i paid $499 for it the year it released, growing up with Tandy's and then Windows clones it was my first exposure to Macintosh. I haven't used anything else since. Professionally or personally. I'm about to go dig it out of storage and install Ubuntu!

The Firefox CPU usage on RU-vid can be fixed by installing h264ify. The nVidia GPU can decode H.264 video, but not VP9 or AV1. So with some tweaks to Firefox you can force it to only accept h.264 videos and render them using the GPU, which will help a lot on a machine that old

I just got gifted one of these, I'll definitely try this out!

I come to this channel to get answers to the great questions that keep me up at night - Thanks Action Retro

i just installed Ubuntu 24 on my laptop, and damn it’s beautiful

I’ve just installed Debian and xfce on mine, works fantastic.

What a coincidence! my Dad just ordered a Late 2006 Mac Mini! I plan to run 10.4 on it.

I just installed Ubuntu Server 24.04 a week ago on one of these. It was kind of a pain because the bootloader was getting messed up by the mac firmware, but now, it's a really capable server, running some Docker instances and more.

Great, I like those older Machines so much too ❤

Nice video! Love the look of these Mac Minis. Tip though, switch to fastfetch instead of neofetch, neofetch hasn’t been supported for a couple of years and has been archived by the dev.

I installed Emmabuntüs on my old 2012 MacMini expanded with 1TB ssd and 10GB ram, and the thing runs like a new machine. Fast and with no hiccups. I did have to use an adapter for that 1TB NMVe ssd. I thoroughly enjoyed that upgrade and installation 😀

Running a maxed out Mac mini (with SSD) just like this w/ EndeavourOS as a smarter smartTV/Media centre. Love the I/O. Works great! :)

i have the 1.66Ghz mini, and about to upgrade it to a core duo. i love the minis as you can grab a few to represent the different Mac eras and have multiple working systems dedicated to mac os 9 and above, without loosing your desk space in the process :)

I run arch one one of these 09 Mac minis, such a treat for how cheap they can be

I’ve been using the 2010 core 2 duo unibody Mac mini as my media center pc (Plex mainly) since I bought in that year, recently I upgraded the ram to 8gb and now I run Ubuntu server in a virtual machine to run docker containers such as home assistant, twin gate and several others, the fans runs quietly too!

Nice! I have one of those... maybe mid-2009 so the middle clock speed. I added the maximum ram and it was a great machine. But the hard disk died... I bet one of these old sata ssd in a box on the shelf would revive it.

I just bought a G4 mini and a 2GHz Core2 Mini 2,1 for $60 a couple weeks ago. Half the fun was getting them to work with modern solid-state storage solutions (the PPC one anyway) but they're definitely a good cheap intro to computing, or a cheap server box.

I use one as a server running Debian Linux, the exact same model too! Fun coincidence. And still a perfectly usable server for low-traffic sites, even running modern containerized apps.

I have the g4 version of that Mac mini, plus an i7 2014 Mac mini and an M1 Mac mini.

My MacMini is 2012. Just installed Ubuntu 20.04. Still great computer for my job.

Here's an idea: Install Snow Leopard on it and use it as a gaming machine for early MacOS 10 games, including PowerPC titles. And make it dual boot with an older version of Windows, to see how it plays Windows games from that period. It should support XP, Vista and 7 natively. I'd personally go for Vista, just for the sake of fun!

it's pronounced: Ooh - Boon - Too The letter “U” has the same phenome in each instance, it is not pronounced Uh- Bun-Two with three different “U” pronunciation. Love your channel!

I use this same generation Mac Mini as a HTPC running Windows 7 and honestly it's a great machine for it

I have pop os running okay on the mac mini 2012 it runs smoothly. I do have 16gb ram so that helps, its neat that we can still use the old macs but with LInux.

I am using ubuntu 22.04 on iMac (27 Inch) with intel chip (late 2015). Works fine. I am loving it.

The funny part is this Mac mini is actually old enough to probably start its first year of high school there growing up so fast😂

I put Manjaro on a 2011 mac mini recently to use as a server. Only tried it for Jellyfin so far but seems to work well. The one thing I cannot figure out but saw you do was to get back to that EFI boot choice. It worked fine to pick up the installer usb but I cannot seem to get back to it now that Manjaro is on there.

Btw just a tip, theres alot of settings and optimised clients for minecraft to run it on low end pcs, the default vanilla client is pretty clunky on low end hardware so thats why it wasnt that smooth :)

Hey, that’s (Nearly) the same Mac Mini as mine! Rocking a late 2009 server with a dualboot between Mint and Snow Leopard :)

I have just got an Imac late 2009 same cpec apart from an e7600 clocked at 3.00 ish GHz. Tried high seria then Monterey, but have settled on Ubuntu as the best experience for this old Mac cost only 50nzd or 30.05usd. I will have to load up vampire survivor's.

Got one of these for learning iPhone development, nice little computer.

Not gonna lie, nowadays, anything lower than 8GB ram and I will avoid any distro with full desktop environment like gnome (default for ubuntu) and just go with a standalone window manager like sway.

I recently got an old AMD Opteron system - very first generation x86-64. Minimum speed it was released at, 1.4 GHz. But dual CPUs. I then loaded it with its maximum 12 GB RAM, and a fast SSD (although the motherboard only had PATA, not SATA!) Then loaded Debian. It was painfully slow. The motherboard was meant for a server, and predates PCI Express, so it only has PCI-X slots. I found a few different "faster than 32-bit, 33 MHz standard PCI" video cards (an Nvidia Quadro and a Matrox Parhelia) and couldn't find modern Debian drivers for either, so graphic acceleration was out; but even in text mode, things were far slower than it felt like they should be. Loaded in a 10Gbit Ethernet card, but local-network speed tests were well under *1* Gbit. Even using a 1 Gbit card, I'd get far slower than 1Gbit. Which is odd, because I know systems of that vintage could actually sustain 1Gbit transfer speeds.

I have a 3.1 Mac Mini like that and it's a very reliable Mac. I put a SSD and a secondary drive in the DVD slot +8 GB RAM and it works just fine.

Brilliant machines for Raspbian OS or for remote backups

I have one of these using OpenCore Legacy Patcher on the latest Mac version, and while performance isn't super great, it definitely is a fun machine to mess around with from time to time. That is especially the case since I got it for $30. lol

I have a g4 of that.. I still love it.. best audio computer

Move over to Solus on this older hardware, and you might see better performance, as SNAP packages are more heavy on resources than they should be.

ON older machines like this if you're going to play RU-vid I highly recommend getting the browser add-on h.264ify as it will force RU-vid to serve h264/avc1 that is much less CPU intensive and can usually be decoded in hardware of that era which will keep it from pegging the CPU at 100% like the default VP9 codec will.

Wow I have this exact Mac Mini that I'm trying to update to something usable. I'm setting it up at our office do display a schedule during work hours. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get Chrome OS Flex to install successfully so far.

I'm using one of these 2009 with Ubuntu as a daily driver. What is really lacking in this video is the Broadcom wifi Bluetooth driver installation which is also not that difficult and improves a lot the overall experience . A suggestion; use it just with some local installed office work suite and for web browsing .... no games work fine in this old dude...

Would be interesting to see if performance improves with Xfce or Lxqt desktops. Might also try an lsusb to see if any of the USB ports are 1.1 instead of 2.0, and which ones are flaky compared to the others

My old Toshiba Satellite L505-S5990 is about 14 years old. I got tired of the incompatibility due to the age of the preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, so I installed Arch-based Manjaro, deciding that the Windows 7 operating system and everything that I had installed on it wasn't worth my hardware's time, and that they could burn in hell. It's been about 20 hours since I installed this new operating system, and so far it's been working fine without noticeable hiccups, unless a bunch of website ads load or I'm doing something intensive. Due to the open-source nature of these projects and the simplicity of their designs, the operating systems are inherently lightweight, and these old computers can mostly handle them without problems. Don't fret too much if you want to install something new on your computer. Mine has 3 GB of RAM, and that operating system works perfectly well.

Check your mouse has no problems like corroded or dulled connections or short-circuit wiring _(or breaking wiring)_ or tinning solder. That mouse might work fine in the USB port if it is plugged into it via a mains-powered USB hub. The symptoms are akin to a lack of power. On the other hand, you might want to check the caps and resistors or soldering or corrosion or dulling of the metal connections. That too could impair a power input-output _(but of course there are also gadgets and multimeters that cold test it)_ and make a mouse lag. A keyboard is another on to test in it for lag _(as in some standard qwerty MSWindows keyboard)._ Interesting how the Wifi _(and at that bluetooth, and all NIC, including RJ45 ethernet LAN)_ don't have a wrapper class _(such as NDISWrapper_or_Ubuntu_custom_wrapper)_ on the Ubuntu ISO considering all Mac computers are a known quantity for components. It would be interesting to see if RAM upgrading could make a difference on that machine such as for browser tabs or humble QEMU usages. MineTest as an alternative testing comparison to Minecraft would seem to make sense for your Mac mini Ubuntu box you have there, ya know. Also a DVD or CD of UT2004 _(Unreal-Tournament 2004, with its Linux install and, as such, no need for it to use WINE or proton, etc.)_ would be good when patched at 64bit for the dual-core usage it then comes with. Thereby, it should be reasonable, especially with community mods. On a side-note _(or as an aside),_ talking about linux and FOSS, maybe ask your viewers to take a look at the Free Software Foundation ORG article _"We need your help to release the LibrePlanet 2024 videos"_ in their site (14th May) because they know some of their fans and supporters watch the video streaming and they made a boob and failed to record its conference footage by means of a disk error or drive problem, and they need help if anybody has a copy to send them _(such as a video file in some sort of whatever format, be it ogg-vorbis-theora or mpeg4 or vp9 or whatever)_ to dig them out of their whole. The electronic mail is "campaigns" for the FSF suffix. They need assistance. One cannot help but wonder if you get that wrapper-class if their video catastrophic situation is resolved by them getting help with the video streams footages. I heard about this after my donation ended up with their standards updating comms coming my way as per usual _(which is fine and handy like this)._ So consider following suit if you so desire. My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.

Love using older macs!

This is bad ass!!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

RAM can be upgraded quite a bit on these. I think 16GB unofficially via some bios/equivalent tweaks. Did this many years back and was good fun. Can't quite remember but I think the CPU may be upgradable too. Awesome little machines.

It'll be interesting to use XFCE and/or LXQt and see how the performance increases compared to the default offering.

Fun video. I upgraded a 2006 intel Mac mini, with a better cpu and 4gb ram (using DosDud'es patch) to boot Linux Mint / Windows 10. Runs great for what it is. Use it in the living room. Nice for when I want to play a DVD since I don't use a stand alone player anymore.

The late 2000's had the best aesthetics in terms of apple products. It's a shame the white plastic tends to turn into this brown colour. And yes it's aluminium, because magnesium is not magnesum.

The fan went nuts when I tried playing games on the mac mini under OS X. I didn't notice the noise in the background.

As a retro Apple collector, I really need to get into these. They're dirt cheap and I can use my much newer and cheaper keyboards and mice for a surprisingly modern experience.

This was my first Mac. Loved it because I walked into an Apple Store and bought the cheapest one they offered... perfect for getting my feet wet. To this day, I didn't know it had Gigabit Ethernet. I was ready to comment that you misspoke, but darn it, you're right!

I got a white MacBook with these Specs. I tried Linux Mint on it.

Great news for my late 2011 dual core mac mini that I have been racking my brain on what to do with. I had a hunch Ubuntu would run, but not maybe the latest version!?

I'm currently commenting and watching this video on an iMac G5 with a 2ghz processor and 1 gig of ram. It's unrelated I just thought it was neat to mention.

If you find the Yutani core, perhaps the USB ports will complement. 😂

iirc, Linux Mint (an Ubuntu LTS based distro) would be running fine on the Mac Mini, to be specific on what DE you'd use would be either XFCE or MATE (GNOME 2), considering how lightweight they are in comparison to KDE Plasma, GNOME or Cinnamon, though this differs. And as for the Nvidia drivers, I think you need to specifically install a certain driver to use the old GPU to its fullest...not so sure, but this is to be certain from my experience at the very least.

Thermal paste is probably turned to dust after 16 years, might not be so glitchy if that's replaced.

I see you installed New Vegas, how did that run given it's on hardware that's contemporary to when the game came out?

The slowness is just the Ubuntu iso, I had a computer with a 8 core cpu and it still took a lot of time to boot.

Gives me an idea for what I could do with my mid 2010 mini since upgrading to an m2…. Did you by chance get the Wi-Fi working?

The last time I tried to install Ubuntu, it worked great as a live image, but had all sorts of issues once installed.

If I ever find one I would totally buy it and install antiX 😊

Funny you should post this. Just loaded Void with xfce on a near identical spec mini. Didnt have any of the graphical issues you experienced though, might just be wayland being wayland. To be fair void is signifigantly lighter than modern ubuntu. She's chunky these days.

When i saw 24.04 I knew I had to download it on my ThinkPad.

Wouldn’t this distro also be a great idea for a Late 2009 iMac, the nice one which was the first fully aluminum chassis but also having a magnetically attached display for easy access? I’ve purchased such an iMac a few months ago for just 30 bucks currently running macOS High Sierra and Windows 11 Pro on it. I’ve also tried out Open Core Legacy Patcher to update to Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura but wasn’t satisfied because of the missing Metal support of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M. The machine runs an Intel Core 2 Duo with 3.06 GHz, a 250 GB SSD as well as 8 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM. Love your stuff and also have some good old Macs in my collection the Macintosh Quadra 700 beeing the most special one I guess. Kind regards from germany.

You mentioned how gnome was snappy. Idk how but the wizards at gnome have made it super efficient on low end graphics as long as you have enough ram(they've also slimmed it down in that way but it's not the lightest)

I think the open source Nvidia driver works best with 16/20 series and up (I would assume it is older for this Mac Mini). But interesting it still works that well.

Do you plan to also test out other distros? I'd like to see how Fedora runs on this thing.

At least this one is the 64 bit Core 2 Duo. I had an imac that still run the 32 bit Core Duo, and linux runs ok on it, video playback is crap though, although I put that down to missing support for the video chipset. Tried different distros from Ventoy also on newer imacs, and for people trying it, boot in grup2 mode, and also wait, it sometimes takes a while to boot.

I just found one of these for $60, was honestly thinking of putting linux or an apple like distro to get it running again!

I resurrected a couple Core 2 Duo notebooks with Ubuntu 24.04 on them. One had 2GB RAM, one had 3GB. I'd say 3GB is the real minimum; the one with 2GB is very slow to boot, it's very slow to load anything (... but in "like new" physical condition so this is the one out of the 2 I ended up using...). Once firefox or whatever eventually quits swapping it actually runs OK, those cores do work pretty hard though (I can hit 100% just having it load for a solid second or two just loading whatever random web page, let alone streaming a video. I did put KDE on there to shave off like 500MB RAM usage, which helped a little but Firefox and steam both use like 1GB RAM or so so that does not help. One of the Core 2 Duos I ended up with has an 18 year old Intel GPU and the other 1 model newer C2D with a 17 year old GPU -- shockingly, they're not just "still supported" by some 3D driver, they actually have fully modernized 3D drivers written within the last 5-6 years. It's still got very low shader model support and such so running most games on it? No. But Steam Remote Play runs a treat on it! I'm using it now when I have friends over, my friend plays on my laptop and I play Steam Remote Play on the C2D (instead of being off in the other room where my desktop is.) On a SLIGHTLY newer setup, my friend (who passed recently) ran a Sandy Bridge (with integrated GPU!). This is only about 3-4 years newer than the C2D era stuff. No Vulkan so no dxvk or vkd3d, but Wine's (OpenGL-based) wined3d had it showing up as a DX11 Feature Level 10.0 card, which is enough to run modern Unity games! It ran nearly 100% of the older games we tried and when we just started throwing stuff onto it off Steam, probably 80% (with 80% of *those* having a playable frame rate.) Which is shocking, I expected it to be closer to 20% success rate once I dipped into the Steam games.

I put the new Fedora on a 2014 mac mini. Also put Kubuntu on a 2013 I mac all working very well.

Is that one of the Mac Minis that one can change out the microprocessor to something a bit more up to date and add a bit more RAM?

To be honest I haven't used ubuntu since 2012 so I decided to dual boot the newest update of budgie on my laptop I got back in 2014 and I gotta say it's definitely an improvement and I like it more than windows. Now if only unreal 5 would work with it.

That slow boot is probably the USB 2.0