Tags: #apple #macbook #vintage
(This is a continuation of the previous post "Bringing my old MacBook Pro 8,2 back to life")
I brought my old MacBook pro 2011 back to life, after years collecting dust in my garage, running Linux Mint beautifully. Fast and modern, but...
If I managed to get it working with Linux, I probably could get it working with OSX too. I decided, then, to get it back to life and using OSX Snow Leopard - the operating system it came with.
When I tried to run the original installer, it access the GPU right away causing those weird rendering issues. With some searching, I found that I could set a nvram variable to disable the dedicated GPU. On Linux I ran (I am almost sure that was the command):
printf '\x07\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00' | sudo tee /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/gpu-power-prefs-fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9
It worked and I got OSX Snow Leopard installed. I had a goal in my mind - being able to access my website using some web browser.
Of course not.
My WiFi network was not supported by that old mac version. After seeing that using that was going to be quite a lot of work, I decided to see what was the oldest version that would work.
When I started upgrading to Mac OSX Lion, instead of holding Option key (⌥), I pressed Command (⌘) + Option (⌥) + P + R and my nvram trick was gone.
After some more searching, I found that I could boot using Command (⌘) + S and boot to single user text mode. When there, I had to run:
nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00
This would make the installer boot, but not the installed version.
To be able to boot into the newly installed OSX Lion - after some more research, I found that I could just delete the radeon drivers. As I deleted incorrect things and had to do this a few times again, I started to move the drivers and restore. Also, every update (Yes! Even Snow Leopard had Apple Software updates working), the drivers were back. Anyway, after many times, I found exactly what to do. I created a bkp directory and ran every software update and every OS upgrade:
This is the /System/Library/Extensions/ of the installed drive
cd /Volumes/Thiago-MBP/bkp
mv ../System/Library/Extensions/*Radeon* .
Eventually in OSX Mavericks (AFAIR), I got WiFi working, but Safari was still not recognising modern certificates
At some point, I thought: I had everything working nicely with Linux Mint - and then I decided to go back to something outdated and full of issues as even new software does not support those old OSX versions and new OSX versions don't support my old Mac. Why do I do that to me?
Anyway, thanks to Internet Archive and lots of patience, I found all the OS installers I needed. I installed and upgraded to:
And when I got to Sierra
FINALLY!!!
No.
Interesting, I found that Youtube is not flaky using this version of OSX + Firefox and it was with Mint. Everything else was better, much better on Linux.
Getting any tool installed was harder as everything dropped support for OSX Sierra. I had to compile most of the tools from source (Luckily not Firefox) and remembered how nice is TextMate - which I am using right now to write this post.
I am trying to decide if I will stick with OSX here or try something different, such as FreeBSD or WindowMakerLive.
Let's see