Last week I mentioned my adventure of installing Linux on a 2010 Mac Mini. Although Ubuntu 18.10 did install and was working for a few days an update left the system unusable. After an update towards the end of last week the system would only boot to a black screen. From what I gathered online I wasn’t the only person who ran into this problem. Anyways, I ended up digging into the matter further.
I once again tried installing Fedora. When I tried to install Fedora 29, I was unable to stop it from booting to a black screen so I decided to try Fedora 28. Using basic graphics mode I was able to get Fedora 28 to boot to the live environment and from there install Fedora on the Mac Mini. After installation I was able to get my Fedora installation to boot. However, when I tried to install the Nvidia driver from RPM Fusion, the system would only boot to a black screen afterwards. I tried installing the Nvidia driver via the negativo17 repository but didn’t expect it to work since the driver distributed from that repository is based on version 418 and the last driver to support the Mac Mini’s GeForce 320M was version 340. Things went as expected. I then tried installing the Nvidia driver manually using a patched version of the 340 driver from here. Unfortunately, that driver doesn’t work with the 4.20 kernel so that was a no go as well.
The reason I hadn’t tried to install the Nvidia driver manually before was because I didn’t want to deal with supporting the setup in the future. As I was trying to install it using the previously linked instructions I felt justified because the guide isn’t nearly as straight forward as installing the driver from a repository. It became a moot point since manual installation didn’t work but it did make me think about the fact that any solution I settled upon would need to be maintained, which lead me to the idea of using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The LTS versions of Ubuntu are supported by Canonical for five years so if I could get 18.04 installed, the setup would have a decent chance of working for five years.
After passing the kernel the “nouveau.modeset=0” argument, just as I had to do with 18.10, I was able to boot into a live environment and install 18.04 to the hard drive. Likewise, I had to use the “nouveau.modeset=0” argument to boot into the installation. Once I was booted into the installation I was able to use “sudo apt install nvidia-340” to install the 340 version of the Nvidia driver. After rebooting everything worked properly. I’m hoping that future updates will be less likely to break this setup since the LTS releases of Ubuntu tend to be more stable than non-LTS versions.
So, yeah, if you want to get a currently supported Linux distro running on a 2010 Mac Mini, take a look at Ubuntu 18.04. It might be your best bet (if it continues to run properly for the next month or so, I’ll say it is your best bet).