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Install Debian on classic MacPro

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Daniel Santos

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 1, 2012
26
10
Portugal
Hello,

I have a classic MacPro (5.1) with two physical drives.
It is running High Sierra at the moment. I would like to install Debian (the latest version) on the second drive and dual boot.
Have searched the net and found some info on it, but it is a bit outdated.
Has any one tried this ?

Regards
 
Install Debian should be very straight forward (install driver properly is another matter).

Anyway, are you still using the original GPU?
 
Last edited:
h9826790 said:
Install Debian should be very straight forward (installing properly driver is another matter).

Anyway, are you still using the original GPU?
Click to expand...

No, I am running an ATI card (I don't have the model on hand right now) that was installed by the company that sold it to me 2nd hand. (CreatePro from the UK)
 
Daniel Santos said:
I have the white background with the grey apple logo on the middle with the progress bar under it
Click to expand...

That not necessary means you have the boot screen. Anyway, if you have that, you can press and hold "option" key during boot, then you can easily switch between different OS.
 
I have 2 laptops, a Mac and another (hp) with Linux MInt on it. I also once considerd to try to install a Linux distro on a Mac but never did it. Tell us if, you had problems with the install and the hardware support...I am also interested in it ;)
 
As long as your graphics card supports a boot screen it should be entirely doable without any great problems. The other question of course is whether Debian will support your GPU, but you can probably run it in VGA / EFI mode as a fallback. It will be slow but it will work. There's reasonable support for AMD GPU's in linux so I think you'll probably be OK.

I run linux (opensuse distro) on my cMP all the time and GPU support is really the only question mark that I can recall. A generic kernel should just work, but if you decide to build a custom, your ethernet is probably an Intel e1000e, the USB is uhci / ehci (and xhci if you've installed a UCB 3 card), and the drives are ordinary SATA. If you have questions about a custom kernel configuration I can probably help.
 
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