How to repurpose Mac Mini Late 2012?

TL; DR: Install Debian 12! It’s easier than you think, and it works fast. Suprisingly fast!

Repurposing, upcycling, fixing, hacking: you name it!

I’m a big fan of extending life of old things, even beyond it’s original inention.

Mac Mini Late 12. What is it for?

It’s still a reasonable hardware, at the time of writing this in 2024. Originally I bought it to be able to develop early iOS apps. Once I got myself my first MacBook Pro, I converted Mac Mini to be home multimedia box. It served it’s purpose quite well, again until I bought a smart TV. I still kept it connected, and updated it until Apple dropped support for newest Mac OSes. I didn’t have time to sell it, so it dusted in the drawer. Instead of purging the internal hard disk and messing around with non-standard Apple screws, I decided to repurpose, upcycle, what not, 240 GB SDD and connected it via USB3 Sata adapter to Mac

Linux? Does it run Linux?

Yes it does, and recent debian installs almost flawlessly… if you have ethernet cable connected to Mac Mini. The only gotcha is that wl wifi drivers are not part of debian netinst and have to be supplied during install. Some suggest that it’s way easier to go through the installation process using ethernet. I don’t fancy moving mac mini and monitor and myself inconviniently to my router which is the only place I can connect ethernet cable nowadays. So I went the hard way. I downloaded the driver from https://github.com/LibreELEC/wlan-firmware/tree/master and placed it into the stick, mounted it duruing netinst and copied firmware to /lib/firmware/b43 (as suggested here: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware). After this I was able to connect to WiFi from the install process and the rest went pretty smooth… except boot. Every time I wanted to boot Linux I needed to hold Alt (aka Option) key just after wonderful boot chime to pull up Apple bootloader. Then I could choose my external hard drive and boot it to Grub. I learned that you need to have small UEFI partion to do the job: https://github.com/t2linux/T2-Ubuntu/issues/86 and: https://superuser.com/questions/1782079/make-existing-external-ubuntu-drive-bootable-on-mac-os. But… I already used full disk. I tried to use gParted and shring the installed partion, but that didn’t work well and I accidentally removed partion table. That was a fresh install, so no data loss, but I had to restart the install process this time I partitioned it to have the UEFI partition and on the occassion I added swap partition too.

First impressions? Awesome!

It’s been a while since I used Linux for desktop. Back in the day I used to work on Debian testing (that was even before Ubuntu was conceived), because it was stable enough, yet it contained recent enough versions of software. I was never a fan of Gnome, but Debian 12 amazed me with responsiveness and general look and feel, even on this oldish hardware. After it got installed, I immediately followed wl howto and properly installed the lan driver for newest avaiblable distribution kernel. No problem followed this Debian howto: https://wiki.debian.org/wl.