Apple iMac, early 2009 by SplitShire

Adventures In iMac with Linux

  • Adam Douglas

Today I was working on a client’s old iMac from early 2009 to recover old photos to an external hard drive. In the process of doing this I thought to myself this would be interesting task to see if I could get Linux running on it and bring some life back into this old computer system. The client considered keeping it initially but being that it is dated and I can’t guarantee it would be fully useable let alone how much it would cost to bring it back to life. There could even be caveats to using Linux that is not desirable to the average user. In all honesty it’s not worth putting more money into it.

Looking into the specifications (see below), it is not that amazing but at the same time this isn’t a horrible system either. It’s just a system that really can no longer use Mac OS on it due to no longer being supported and the fact that it just slows the entire system down now.

Model Number A1224
EMC Number 2266
Audio 1x sound in, 1x headphone, 1x sound out
Display 20” TFT Active Matrix LCD (1680x1050 native)
Processor 2.66 Ghz Core 2 Due (E8135)
RAM 8GB 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Video NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB (shared system RAM)
Webcam iSight
Speakers Built-in stereo underneath display
USB 4x USB 2.0 ports
Firewire 1x Firewire 800
DisplayPort 1x mini DisplayPort
Microphone 1x built-in
Hard Drive 320GB SATA

So in the end I did end up buying the system off the client for $25 CAD. I thought this is fair and really it’s cheap entertainment for myself (smile). I’m not certain as to why I find this so interesting but we will see where this adventure will take me on getting Arch Linux running on this old system.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting 100DaysToOffload.com.

    • Fix link to use https
    • remove tag apple, imac
    • change topic

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