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A friend recently gave me an old macbook, [from about 2009-ish?]

TL;DR
Linux Mint with it’s Cinnamon desktop resulted in the fewest headaches out of the box for me and my needs.

I’ve been looking for a lightweight PC to serve as a dock for my portable hard drives, kind of functioning as an ugly sort of NAS. I have been using my 2011 Macbook Pro with a USB hub. However, it is a pain to disconnect all the USB drives from it if I need to move. But with another small computer I can permanently untether the Macbook and use it around the house again!

So when I was gifted another old Macbook, I set about finding what Linux distro would work best with it.

TIP: To get to the boot select screen on this version of a Macbook, press and hold the Option key when the machine is first booted until the boot device selection menu appears.

As I dabbled, I came up with a list of features I was looking for.

  • Does it boot without error?
  • Does it resume from sleep?
  • Does it resume from a lid close?
  • Does the bluetooth work?
  • Does the wifi work out of the box?
  • Other notes

These are the distros I ended up trying

  • Manjaro
  • ElementaryOS
  • Pop! OS
  • Ubuntu
  • Deepin
  • Ubuntu with MATE
  • Mint
Boots?Resume from sleep?Resume from lid close?Bluetooth?Wifi OOTB?Notes
Manjaro KDEYes, but with errorsYesNonot testedYes
Manjaro XFCEYesYesYesNo, headphones not recognized as outputNo/Yes, when installed on EthernetNo option to add nVidia drivers from install disc
Wifi works OOB
elementaryOSYesNoNonot testedNo
Pop! OSYesYesNonot testedNo
UbuntuYesYesNoYesNo/Yes, when installed on Ethernet
Linux MintYesYesYesYesNo, but an easy add from discwifi & nVidia drivers easily added from disc
DeepinYes, but slowNoNoYesYestrackpad X-axis input is Y-axis cursor movement & no x-axis cursor movement possible
App Store and default browser don’t work
The test results

The most difficult hurdle for any of these distros to overcome was resuming from sleep due to the lid being closed. All but Mint and Manjaro XFCE failed this test. I imagine this is more of a desktop environment issue than related to any particular underlying Linux distro.

The results of these simple tests put Linux Mint with it’s default Cinnamon desktop as the clear winner for my needs.

Worth noting is the utter failure of the Deepin distro. It was unusable on this Macbook and disappointing to such a degree that I doubt I’ll bother with it ever again.

I’ve been working with a colleague on getting a logo designed for the game company he has recently started. The designer that was hired used a font called “Exo” in the logo. The source file was given to us in a .svg file. And in order to view the logo with the correct font, I first had to install the Exo fontface on my Ubuntu installation.
Here’s how I did it.
First, find the fontface for download somewhere. We ended up finding it on fontsquirrel.com and downloading it in .zip format. Next you will need to create a .fonts folder under your /home/<user-name>/ folder. Inside this .fonts folder, create an ‘exo’ folder to store the actual OTF files. Extract the files from the exo.zip file into /home/<user-name>/.fonts/exo. Finally, run the following command:
sudo fc-cache -f -v

You should see all the font caches on your machine getting refreshed, including the new .fonts folder.
After this, I opened our logo.svg file in Inkscape and the correct font was applied.

Easy as that!

Everything looks cool so far on my comic site so far. No issues with ComicPress plugin I’m using there. It just looks terrible, as I’m using the out-of-the-box theme. I hope at some point I’ll be able to start looking at learning to theme WordPress sites.

But enough about that!

This past weekend I finally got fed up with the shitty drivers available for the shitty broadcom BC4311 series wireless network adapter that my shitty Dell Inspiron 1521 has.

I have tried a few more Linux distros via LiveCD:

Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit – Something about the color scheme of this distro really turns me off, the reddish-purple just makes me angry. That and the fact that my Broadcom doesn’t work, despite trying the troubleshooting items I find online.

Mint 12 64-bit – I so want version of Linux to work because of its emphasis on aesthetics. Alas, its build on Debian, just like Ubuntu, so my wireless doesn’t work here. I doubt my craptop would support a decent looking UI anyway.

Mandriva 2011 – I know next to nothing about this distro, but I am impressed with the UI and how easily I got my wireless to work.

I almost went with Mandriva, until I remembered each distro can come with different frontend/UI/desktop environment (I don’t know what the graphical part of the OS is technically called). Going back to my fav distro, I found that Mint is available in a LXDE version! Knowing what a POS my ancient laptop is, I opted to take up the ‘L’ part of the LXDE environment. Its supposed to be pretty light, so that would definitely help out my aging Athlon 2800 system. I fired up the live cd and everything looked nice. Much better than the unintuitive, unattractive KDE desktop I had spent the past month or two with.

Still no wireless support until I found this ->http://nfolamp.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/ubuntu-11-10-getting-wireless-bcm4311-working/

After trying the items on this blog, I got wireless working on LiveCD! Bingo!

I promptly clicked the “Install Linux Mint” icon. Everything has been working great since then. A huge improvement over my experience with Fedora 16 and Fedora 16 KDE.

Now, if they’ll only come out with a 64-bit version…

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