AlmaLinux on 2012 Mini?

[Boyd01]

Am trying to install AlmaLinux on a Mac for an environment that's similar to a server that I lease. Was able to install it (after a few tries) on Parallels on my 2018 Mini. It works well and might be all I really need. But I thought it would be nice to install it to boot on an old Mini. So, I used rufus (in a Windows VM) to create a USB installer and after a few mishaps was able to boot my 2012 2.6 ghz i7 quad-core/16gb/256gb from it.

The installer runs fine, but I hit a roadblock when choosing a disk. I want to use an old Samsung T3 500gb USB ssd but was unsure how to format it. Tried both exFAT and FAT (formatting with disk utility on MacOS) but both of them show only 1gb of free space to the installer, even though the disk is empty. After a lot of screwing around (which I really didn't understand 🤣 ) was able to create the needed partitions using the installer and completed the full installation.

You can probably guess what came next... the Mini doesn't see that external disk as bootable and the finder just gives an error that it's an unknown format. Here's a screenshot of what the installer created, but I'm over my head here....

TL;DR... how should I format a USB SSD to install Linux on a 2012 Mini? (probably a generic question and not something specific to AlmaLinux?) [edit]Actually, not a generic question, problem seems to be specific to RHEL versions...

 

[Grumpus]

Have you tried it without using LVM?

 

[Boyd01]

Thanks. Yeah, I tried the standard partion option. Have tried formatting the external SSD as exFAT and FAT - same problem, the installer shows the total capacity of the disk correctly but can only access a very small amount available (between 200 to 1000 MB, depending on other variables). I also tried formatting as APFS and adding a FAT or exFAT container (which other linux distro's say you can do). Same problem there.

Finally, this old Mini is still on Catalina so I used CCC to make a bootable clone of the internal (original Apple) 256gb SSD and booted from the external ssd. Then I tried using the internal SSD to install Linux - same problem. No doubt I'm missing something obvious here, but running out of ideas. Maybe I'll try another Linux distro, just for fun, to see if that installs properly.

 

[Boyd01]

Installed ubuntu desktop on the internal SSD, which was quick and easy. Thought maybe I could just delete those partitions and install almalinux, but had the same problem.... disk capacity is correctly shown but only something like 2 MB available for installation. Weird.

Gave up and re-installed ubuntu, which boots properly from the 2012 Mini internal SSD. The desktop version is missing some important things (like apache2, sshd...) but was pretty easy to install them, so I'll just see how I like it. The ubuntu GUI is nice, but not too interested in that, will be using this as a server and connecting with ssh on my LAN. This is what I ended up with.... interesting that it seems to think my 2012 Mini has 8 cores instead of 4 and also has the speed wrong.

Meanwhile, I can use almalinux in a VM on my 2018 Mini...

Would still like to install almalinux on the 2012 Mini someday, but this works and I've spent way too much time already, so that can wait for another day. 😀

[edit]Just stumbled on this, his Mini is almost identical to mine, he had the same kind of problems and developed work-arounds. Maybe someday...

Installing Alma or Rocky Linux on Macmini Intel

Installing Alma or Rocky Linux on Macmini Intel . GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

 

[Boyd01]

Would still like to install almalinux on the 2012 Mini someday, but this works and I've spent way too much time already, so that can wait for another day.

And today is another day! It just bothered me that I couldn't get it working before. Ubuntu seems fine - and dead easy to install, if any other 2012 Mini owners are looking for a Linux version. But the whole idea was to create something that closely mirrors my leased server, so I can transition away from using MAMP for local development and testing.

So, I used the installation tutorial in the link I posted above. First try booted directly into grub instead of starting Linux. Wasted a good deal of time troubleshooting but finally bailed. For the second try, I used almalinux 9, which is the same version the author of the tutorial used (I used version 8 previously). This finally worked! 😃