Mac Mini late 2012 (6,1 6,2 6,3)

Based on a number of posts that seem to deal mostly with the issue of compiling a wifi driver for the late 2012 mac mini -- I expected install to be a breeze. Quite the contrary -- I can't get ubuntu installed on the machine.

Here is my experience so far:
With 12.10
* USB drives don't work at all -- always gives a boot error
* Burned to dvd and used an external drive -- gets to the selection screen but never gets past the ubuntu boot animation (with and without the apic flag set.)


I've been around ubuntu and mac for a while, but my last install was on a 2007 imac and it was easy-peazy.

So I'm curious as to how those of you who did install actually did it. Any help is appreciated.

Progress:
This link helped --
MacTel Instructions -- Boot from USB -- Manual Approach

I can now boot the USB drive and get up to the install procedure.

However, the grub install fails. That might be due to my setup though so I need to try again a different way.

Further progress:

The grub issue was solved by

• installing refit -- making sure its working, and then running the install.

• This maybe specific to the server version (6,3) I had it take over the entire second hard drive and installed grub there.

Not sure if installing grub to the first hard drive would work.

Now I can select Ubuntu using refit at boot time.

I knew networking would not work, but the display is also defaulting to VGA so the video card likely needs a driver (which may resolve itself once I get online.)

I'm taking notes for a guide writeup.

Mac mini server late 2012 has a lot in common with the MBP 9,1 (non retina, 15", mid 2012). So you should look into threads like:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2042319

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ghetto2ivy

I knew networking would not work

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try what they mention in the above thread to get the networking working.

Quote:

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(which may resolve itself once I get online.)

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can't you at least connect with an ethernet cable? if

Code:

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sudo service network-manager restart

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does not work, then you may need to configure the network manually:

Code:

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sudo ifconfig eth0 your_ip_addr
sudo route add default gw router_ip_addr
echo "nameserver dns_ip_addr | sudo tee -a /etc/resolv.conf"

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after you are connected you can download dhcpcd:

Code:

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sudo apt-get install dhcpcd
sudo dhcpcd eth0

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Quote:

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I'm taking notes for a guide writeup.

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looking forward to your writeup :)
good luck

Thanks for the hint with mbp 9,1

I did get networking to work with these directions
http://www.frozenindustries.com/2012...ini-late-2012/

Video was an issue with using the DVI to VGA adapter -- that seems to be limited to 1024x768. Switching to HDMI seems to have fixed that. Haven't tried other adapters.


Soundcard works great out of the box, both over the audio out and over HDMI. USB3 works fine as well.

I managed to get it to download the drivers by using an old USB ethernet device, otherwise I would have sneaker-net it.

To do:

• Wifi
• SdCard

WiFi turned out to be a Hardware issue, which led to an AppleCare nightmare. Either way, I'm back online and have some updated observations

WiFi:
Didn't work out of box, but used a USB network adapter that did work and to my surprise ubuntu found the restricted drivers and installed them.

Boot:
On reinstalling, I started seeing an issue that affected others - the system wouldn't boot. So I had to add the NOAPIC option to grub's startup options.

Bluetooth:
Shows not found -- but my Bluetooth Keyboard -- paired in OS X works in Ubuntu Just fine. Actually it works in reFit and grub too! However, that good news does not extend to my bluetooth apple magic trackpad. That isn't recognized, and without bluetooth hardware being seen, I'm afraid it won't be resolvable. I'd rather have a BT keyboard available in grub and refit.

SD Card no progress.

Raid:
I have the server version and my orginal intent was to run a 100GB mac Raid-1 and 900GB ubuntu Raid-1. However, ReFit and mac Raid don't play nicely together, and Ubuntu seemed to have an issue loading Grub to the drives. So I had to abandon those plans and now just use 1 hard drive for mac, and 1 hard drive for linux.

So this saga continues and I still dont have a box to my liking. Writing from MacOS to Ext4 Drives via Paragons' software was causing my drives to be checked on every ubuntu run, usually resulting in a read only file system.

New lesson: 12.04.2 does support wireless out of box, just have to activate the driver.

Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse are very unreliable. No real way to fix since its about how mac handles the devices in the efi boot. It seems to intercept regular bluetooth communication. Right now I'm working off a logitech wireless with unifying dongle. Even then I need mac to unify the receiver for keyboard and mouse.

Still I tried wiping out the mac -- and going ubuntu solo -- didn't see a point if i cant easily read files in mac, when i needed to. Here started a painful bunch of new lessons:

1. even with a mbr partition table you need the boot partition or grub install fails.
2. Even in gparted, the efi bios somehow interferes with moving partitions past certain boundaries in the hard drive. This I could usually end up with odd 1-3 hundred meg unused partitions here and there toward the end of the drive, where I can't move partions into.
3. on the server model, don't have one hard drive mbr and another guid. On install grub will only treat the guid drives as bootable, and didn't find any OS on the MBR drive.

So far thoroughly regretting not building my own box, as I've done so many times before.

I can't seem to get the xorg server to run in the right mode. It starts up, but the color is all dithered or looks like 256 color mode (8bpp?). I can't seem to figure it out. I am using HDMI out and I am assuming that this mac mini has the Intel HD 4000 series graphics card. Any hints?

12.10 has (had?) that bug. It was a kernel bug in how HDMI was handled. I ended up sticking with Precise, but there were 2 workarounds I remember: 1) Suspend then Resume, the issue goes away (mostly). 2) Using a Mini-DV to anything but HDMI converter, the issue is with hdmi so anything not hdmi worked fine.

I didn't want to putz around with the other option -- upgrading the kernel to 3.7. This all may be different now that 12.04.2 is running the 3.5 kernel anyway -- but I'm not having that issue now.

Some useful links:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25732

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...el/+bug/803094

Also an update on the peculiarity of the SD Card!

The SD card seems to only work if the Ethernet port is the active connection. Very strange. 100% reproducible.