Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Installing Linux on Mac Pro 5,1

A

amishallin

macrumors member
Original poster
May 31, 2020
89
69
With the news of Apple moving away from Intel I started to look at various Linux distros. They all seem to say the same thing: use a USB stick and boot from it using the Opt key during startup. Here is my issue... I have an RX 580 with no boot screen. In order to get a boot screen I'd have to purchase a Mac edition or flashed card.

Can Mac's still boot from a DVD by pressing the C key during startup? Or did that die with the PowerMacs? Is a boot loader (such as Grub) still used to choose which OS to boot from?
 
Reboot, then hold down Alt key almost immediately. Wait while still holding it down. If you eventually get a screen asking you which disk to boot from, you have success. Otherwise you have your unfortunate answer.

Another trick may be to try installing Refind. I don't know if this ability got removed with that upgrade to a 'metal' card like the 580, but may be worth a try? http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html

One thing you can do is buy a well used ATI 4870 or 5870 from ebay for $100 or even less. Even if it has a bad fan (they often get gunked up and sounds scratchy), you can just run both in parallel and use the 580 for linux, 4870 just to get access to the boot screen as the default OSX card.

You have to take care to find an REAL official Apple one. I bought one and it was aftermarket which won't do the trick for you. Go to Ebay and look for ones that have one DVI and one mini Displayport. If you see one with two DVI that's not an Apple one.

I just did a search and found a 4870 and 5870 for between $50-$60

That may do the trick.

For a nice zippy experience, i have been experimenting with Linux distros recently. For good stability, nice mac like interface try Elementary OS. Use 'Etcher' on mac to burn their ISO to a thumbdrive and you are off to the races. Elementary really is very stable, and has a nice experience. The 'Photos' app is a fork of Shotwell and is really quite a good alternative to Apple Photos. Elementary doesn't have global menus etc, but you will feel quite at home. Also very fast. Zorin also worth a look. Zorin has some nice UI options. These are both downstream from Ubuntu distros, but well supported. I tried Ubuntu (Budgie), and found stability and speed to be a big problem. Tried Fedora, Solus, but they lack application support.

If you do install, try installing Flatpak and Snap to get access to more apps.

I'm still on the fence moving to Linux myself. My big hold back is photography app support after growing a massive 20 year image catalog in Lightroom. I'm looking at just upgrading my Mac Pro 4,1 (which is now a 5,1 after putting in a 5870 two years back) to a Mojave capable machine by getting one of those ATI 580 cars to run alongside the 4870 so I can do Linux on a separate disk.

The move to ARM is annoying. I have successfully installed Elementary and Zorin on some old macs for the kids (for years now). Not being able to recycle these perfectly good old computers is quite annoying. Just like it is now quite annoying that I can't upgrade my $3000 Mac Pro that has perfectly adequate specs (8 2.2ghz cores, 12GB RAM).
 
I ended up giving OpenCore 0.5.9 a try. I watched a couple videos about it on youtube and installation seemed fairly straightforward. After rebooting I was greeted with an Apple like boot screen (using RADEON RX 580). It booted into Mohave just fine. When I selected Catalina it just sat at a black screen with a white apple. Catalina was now broken. I inserted the USB stick with dosdude1's patcher and did a reinstall. Catalina now boots normally with OpenCore and nothing was lost.

I also found out my Mac Pro 5,1 won't boot from a DVD while holding the "C" key during startup. Not sure if that's because it was a Linux install disk or a feature lost to time.

I decided to go with Ubuntu (used it on a PowerMac G3 for 10 years) and installed it via USB stick to an old unused HDD. I'm able to triple boot now.

Seems like the only fan I can control under Linux is the GPU fan. All the temp sensors are readable however. I'm sure better support will come with time.
 
Using a 4,1, sometimes have to do pram zap to get the c key to work.

Need to post some logs in the forums and figure out nvidia. GTX780 is ok in nouveau, but
Nvidia driver needs all the correct variables in order to use the set pcie info. Perhaps opencore
can do it.

As long as no sleep happens I can set the fans in mac and reboot in win or lin.
 
Last edited:
I've used elementaryOS and Pop!_OS on a 5,1 using OpenCore to dual-boot with macOS Catalina, worked really well.

Found Pop!_OS was a bit more responsive, was happy to use my Mac Edition 680, a stock 1080, or an RX 5700 XT.
 
Draeconis said:
I've used elementaryOS and Pop!_OS on a 5,1 using OpenCore to dual-boot with macOS Catalina, worked really well.

Found Pop!_OS was a bit more responsive, was happy to use my Mac Edition 680, a stock 1080, or an RX 5700 XT.
Click to expand...
I notice your signature says 8tb ZFS on Mojave, how is this possible? thx
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back