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Recommended secondary OS for early 2008 17" MBP?

Z

zackkmac

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 7, 2008
880
129
Denver
Hi everyone, I have a pre-unibody 2008 17" MacBook Pro that I am trying to get set up on a dual boot. It is currently running Catalina on an SSD formatted as APFS and is equipped with a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 6GB RAM. I'm just looking for something speedier and easier on the older hardware that will make it a bit more fun to use. Catalina is fine, just a bit laggy, but even the latest supported OS (El Capitan) was really no quicker, so I'd rather be running the latest.

Just looking to see what others suggest. I'm thinking Windows 10 or Ubuntu, but I've been having issues getting either one of those installers to boot from USB. Not sure if I need to buckle down and get some blank DVDs to burn or if this generation MBP is just tricky to work with when installing other OSes.

Any help is appreciated.
 
StellarVixen said:
So, it worked?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately not, no. My 2.0 drive, formatted as FAT32 (also tried exFAT) is still not recognizable when using the Option key boot drive screen. A long time ago I even tried using rEFIt as an alternative and it would freeze after selecting the USB as the boot drive.
 
Something with a lightweight desktop environment. Ubuntu MATE could be a good choice. 19.10 has just launched and has a lot of refinements and improvements in the MATE desktop.
 
zackkmac said:
Unfortunately not, no. My 2.0 drive, formatted as FAT32 (also tried exFAT) is still not recognizable when using the Option key boot drive screen. A long time ago I even tried using rEFIt as an alternative and it would freeze after selecting the USB as the boot drive.
Click to expand...
Have you done the correct procedure to make a bootable installer usbkey? Each OS have its own. Btw... Catalina on a 2008 mbp? Congrats :) I've got a early2009 and I'm still on 10.11.
 
Argyboy said:
Something with a lightweight desktop environment. Ubuntu MATE could be a good choice. 19.10 has just launched and has a lot of refinements and improvements in the MATE desktop.
Click to expand...

I'll try MATE, the lighter the better honestly. I liked the normal 19.10 well enough so a speedier version would be nice.

RickyHunter said:
Have you done the correct procedure to make a bootable installer usbkey? Each OS have its own. Btw... Catalina on a 2008 mbp? Congrats :) I've got a early2009 and I'm still on 10.11.
Click to expand...

I guess I hadn't because I finally used my Mac Pro running Windows 10 to make the USB and got the MBP to finally install 19.10. My only issue now is I have to edit the boot file to "nomodeset" each time I boot up the laptop and I'm not sure yet how to get it to boot correctly on its own.
 
Mate is becoming less and less light..

I'd probably just run Manjaro w/*pick a desktop that way you have access to the AUR for all the "fun" stuff that Apple includes
 
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