iMac - frugal install?

[Marcel]

I have just changed from PC to a desktop all-in-one iMac. I had a frugal installed puppy (slacko) on the PC. Can I do a frugal install on my Imac? If so, how? I'm not yery familiar with my iMac, so simple directions would be much appreciated.

[bigpup]

I guess no one that has done this to an Imac is going to help you.
I have never done it.

If it is an Intel based Mac, I am sure it can be done.

Should be able to install Puppy the same way you installed it on the PC.

I would think you would need to have a separate partition, formatted in a Linux ext 2,3, or 4 format, to install to.

Probably need something special with a boot loader if you want to keep the Apple OS and duel boot.

I would start with a Google search for Linux on an IMAC.
That should give you info on what to do.

[Puppus Dogfellow]

can your machine boot off usb?

[Les Kerf]

I have not done a frugal install on an iMac, but I have booted a USB thumb drive.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=88676

You will almost certainly need to create a suitably formatted partition, and then use some form of UEFI bootloader.

In short, I do not know exactly how to accomplish this; I was reluctant to alter the partitions on my Wife's iMac and never pursued it any further.
Good luck.
Les

[Puppus Dogfellow]

usb3 with f2fs should be plenty fast...

[tempestuous]

Puppy should run on all x86 Macs, but there can be some frustrating configuration problems with drivers/hardware.
Initially, you should boot up to your Puppy CD of choice, just to see how everything is working (or not working).
Quite frankly, you should have tried this even before posting on the forum.

Now you need to realise that Puppy cannot deal with the Mac's hard drive format: journalled HFS+
so the first thing you must do is resize (shrink) the existing partition, ready for Puppy to create an ext3 or ext4 partition in the newly created space.
Then you must install and configure a third-party boot manager, since the standard OSX boot manager cannot boot a Linux installation.
There's a full HOWTO here -
http://lifehacker.com/5934942/how-to-du ... e-hardware
All in all, a bit of work, and if you make a mistake you could end up nuking your current OSX installation.

I think it would be so much more sensible to do a frugal installation of Puppy to a USB flash drive.

[Ted Dog]

was able to boot a one year old version of fatdog64 but not the newer ones. I think the method of dual use bootloaders confuses IMac. But I used a liveDVD with multisession.

[tempestuous]

Marcel, it's been a week and a half.

What's the outcome?

[Ted Dog]

I am interested as well.. I forgot my admin password to my mac. so I can't bless the boot loader to use EFi the correct way according to reFIT developer. And macs will not boot with a EFI bootloader ( way of modern fatdog64 ) so was going to remaster fatdog64 630 with correct hardware blob for HDMI sound like I did for past fatdogs on macs. You should try Slacko64 it does not have EFI boot loaders like fatdog.. butthe video most likely will not work ( bios node boot without bios corrected video support )
with EFI bootloader added to EFI partition the linux boots really fast and wedges itself to be run first until you do a major upgrade to OSX.

[tempestuous]

Earth to Marcel.
Are you receiving?

[bark_bark_bark]

I never saw macs as real computers.

[bigpup]

I think Marcel went to buy a PC.

[Billtoo]

I never saw macs as real computers.

I have the least expensive Macmini (I upped the ram to 16gb) and I'm
running ubuntu 14.04 LTS with it.
Also run Quirky Tahr 6.0.5 from a usb 3.0 hard drive (there are 4 usb
3.0 ports).
A couple of other pups from the usb 3.0 drive as well.

Computer
Processor 4x Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz
Memory 16338MB (497MB used)
Operating System Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
User Name bill (Bill)
Date/Time Fri 16 May 2014 11:04:09 PM EDT
Display
Resolution 1920x1080 pixels
OpenGL Renderer Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Mobile
X11 Vendor The X.Org Foundation
Operating System
Version
Kernel Linux 3.13.0-24-generic (x86_64)
Compiled #47-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 2 23:30:00 UTC 2014
C Library Unknown
Default C Compiler GNU C Compiler version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
Distribution Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Benchmarks

CPU Blowfish
This Machine 2501 MHz 4.472
Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.50GHz (null) 26.1876862
PowerPC 740/750 (280.00MHz) (null) 172.816713
CPU CryptoHash
This Machine 2501 MHz 394.858
CPU Fibonacci
This Machine 2501 MHz 1.653
Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.50GHz (null) 8.1375674
PowerPC 740/750 (280.00MHz) (null) 58.07682
CPU N-Queens
This Machine 2501 MHz 3.908
FPU FFT
This Machine 2501 MHz 0.922
FPU Raytracing
This Machine 2501 MHz 3.447
Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.50GHz (null) 40.8816714
PowerPC 740/750 (280.00MHz) (null) 161.312647

The Macmini is pricey but works really well I think

[amigo]

I'm pretty sure that the OP's wish is not possible with Puppy -because of the filesystem used by the mac. Some version of Puppy may well boot from CD and run, but frugal installation would be impossible. Installation to a properly-formatted partition or USB drive should work, though.

[tempestuous]

I'm pretty sure that the OP's wish is not possible with Puppy -because of the filesystem used by the mac. Some version of Puppy may well boot from CD and run, but frugal installation would be impossible. Installation to a properly-formatted partition or USB drive should work, though.

Yep. Pretty much exactly what I said in the 6th post in this thread.

[Les Kerf]

...
I have the least expensive Macmini (I upped the ram to 16gb) and I'm
running ubuntu 14.04 LTS with it.
Also run Quirky Tahr 6.0.5 from a usb 3.0 hard drive (there are 4 usb
3.0 ports).
A couple of other pups from the usb 3.0 drive as well...

1. What filesystem are you using on the hard drive?

2. What did you have to do to get the USB installs to boot?. I managed to get Puppy to boot from our iMac, but had to go through some pretty wild gyrations to accomplish the feat; I suspect that there must be a better way than my method.

Thanks,
Les

[Billtoo]

1. What filesystem are you using on the hard drive?

2. What did you have to do to get the USB installs to boot?. I managed to get Puppy to boot from our iMac, but had to go through some pretty wild gyrations to accomplish the feat; I suspect that there must be a better way than my method.

Thanks,
Les

I have LxPup 14.03 installed to a 400x 16gb sdhc card which is plugged into
a usb card reader.
I used gparted in my ubuntu install to create an ext 4 partition on
the sdhc card and set the boot flag, then made a lxpup1403 directory, clicked on the
lxpup iso and copied initrd,vmlinuz, and puppy_lxpup_14.03.sfs to the
lxpup1403 directory.
I moved the card reader to another pc that is running puppy and ran
grub4dos pointing to the sdhc card only, it produced this menu.lst on
the card:

# menu.lst produced by grub4dosconfig-v1.8.9
color blue/cyan yellow/blue white/black cyan/black
#splashimage=/splash.xpm
timeout 10
default 0

# Frugal installed Puppy

title Puppy lxpup 14.03 (sdc1/lxpup1403)
uuid dcb66f05-ced0-4107-8982-64edc9d96474
kernel /lxpup1403/vmlinuz psubdir=lxpup1403 pmedia=usbflash pfix=fsck
initrd /lxpup1403/initrd.gz

# Windows
# this entry searches Windows on the HDD and boot it up
title Windows\nBoot up Windows if installed
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map --hook
errorcheck off
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /bootmgr
chainloader /bootmgr
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /ntldr
chainloader /ntldr
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /io.sys
chainloader /io.sys
errorcheck on

# Advanced Menu
title Advanced menu
configfile /menu-advanced.lst
commandline

Plugged the card reader back into the Macmini and powered on holding the
left option key down, a screen with a hard drive icon + a cd drive icon
came up, chose the cd icon and it booted LxPup from the sdhc card.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I did the Quirky Tahr install on the usb 3.0 hard drive from a pc
running Precise Puppy, it recommended a grub4dos entry which I saved
to a file and then ran grub4dos pointing to the usb 3.0 hard drive
only, the menu.lst that was created was different from the recommended
grub4dos so I deleted the entry for Quirky and copied the recommended
entry to it:

# menu.lst produced by grub4dosconfig-v1.8.9
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
#splashimage=/splash.xpm
timeout 10
default 0

# Frugal installed Puppy

title Puppy xprecise 2.3 (sdb3/xprecise23)
uuid 33c26b53-3cf5-4eac-bdd1-269091295826
kernel /xprecise23/vmlinuz psubdir=xprecise23 pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck
initrd /xprecise23/initrd.gz

# Full installed Linux

title Quirky 6.0.5 (full install on sdb1)
uuid db00dec8-c3dc-465c-8a67-e383e3848fda
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=PARTUUID=a19656f4-01 rootwait rw

# Windows
# this entry searches Windows on the HDD and boot it up
title Windows\nBoot up Windows if installed
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map --hook
errorcheck off
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /bootmgr
chainloader /bootmgr
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /ntldr
chainloader /ntldr
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /io.sys
chainloader /io.sys
errorcheck on

# Advanced Menu
title Advanced menu
configfile /menu-advanced.lst
commandline

I did the frugal install of xprecise23 later and when grub4dos was run
it changed my Quirky entry so I deleted it and copied the recommended
entry from the file that I had saved earlier, without the "kernel
/boot/vmlinuz root=PARTUUID=a19656f4-01 rootwait rw" Quirky won't boot.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To install ubuntu on the hard drive of the Macmini I used the bootcamp
howto to resize and create an ext 4 partition, then booted the ubuntu dvd by
holding down the left option key and ran the ubuntu installer.

As a previous poster said if you make an error you will nuke your OSX,
I did that so now my Macmini runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from the hard drive and
Quirky + other pups from usb, didn't use OSX much anyways

That's it as well as I can remember.

[Ted Dog]

mine doee bave a sdcard slot as well.. never noticed that before. wonder how it would work with a EFI bootloader like I boot my Fatdog64 on my Win8 box. How hard is it to reinstall a mac have all the stuff that came with it¿

[Billtoo]

mine doee bave a sdcard slot as well.. never noticed that before. wonder how it would work with a EFI bootloader like I boot my Fatdog64 on my Win8 box. How hard is it to reinstall a mac have all the stuff that came with it¿

Mine doesn't have an sdcard slot, I have the sdhc card plugged into a usb card reader.
Macs used to come with a set of dvd's with the OS on it that could be used to re-install everything, the new ones don't so I guess I'd have see about getting one from Apple but I don't intend to do that.

[Ted Dog]

was looking for mine... did not find the DVDS or the VGA adapter I have no idea where it went. Well I have some idea but if I ask said cousin if he took it and he did not he will give me years of grief.