Tags: #apple #macbook #vintage
This is my old MacBook Pro 8,2 2011. It was in my garage collecting dust after it's dedicated GPU got toasted. I am not great with electronics, so replacing the soldered Radeon GPU was not something I thought I'd ever do.
But...
One day I bumped into a youtube channel called ActionRetro and I saw a video of that guy getting an old Mac and bringing it back to life with Linux, so I thought: "With Linux, possibly I can blacklist radeon gpu and bring it back to life, so I decided to try.
When opened, surprisingly it was not bad, but considering its GPU was toasted, it was better to remove dust from coolers and why not everywhere else? Time to take it apart
Of course, they are going to use a screw that is completely and totally weird.
Luckly, I was prepared.
First, let's remove the battery to make sure things will not get worse and my mac will work (possibly).
Important to say, the amazing iFixIt tutorial helped me taking it apart without damaging some very delicate cables
Now, with the battery out, I started removing every component and disconnecting all cables following the teardown tutorial. At the end, it was satisfying to see everything out.
The cleaned motherboard looks nice. Everything is very nicely packed and engineered. Nice machine.
After cleaning and removing all the dust with a air blower and a vacuum cleaner, I put it all together. I decided to upgrade that spending as least as possible, so I went to AliExpress and bought a 15 CAD SDD!
I am not sure why, but this SSD is lighter than the other ones I have.
Instead of going with mainstream, I decided to try Bodhi Linux, which uses Enlightenment desktop environment. It looks very fancy and modern.
Beautiful, but it didn't install :(
Linux Mint to the rescue!
To boot without accessing the GPU, after some googling, I found the grub parameters to blacklist radeon and all amd GPUs.
In the grub menu, select the first option and press e to edit the boot parameters. add amdgpu.modeset=0 radeon.modeset=0 at the end of the linux line.
Installation started with no problems. Hopefully, this time it will work.
And... It installed!!! Let's see if it boots correctly.
No.
But, it was my mistake. I forgot to change grub to block radeon and amdgpu.
Let's make it permanent. I don't want to do that all the time.
$ sudo nano /etc/default/grub
# Inside the file, add:
GRUB_TERMINAL=console
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset radeon.modeset=0 i915.modeset=1 text"
Update grub and reboot
$ sudo update-grub
That is all.
YES!!!
Linux Mint works great. Fast and nice.
Youtube videos are a bit flaky, but other than that, all great. Although the SSD was very, very cheap, it's fast and nice.
By the way, I wrote this post on my 2011 MacBook Pro 8,2 with Linux Mint.