If you want to install centos 5.5 on an intel mac mini it is pretty easy. My guess is the same process applied to other Apple computers, but I have not tried it on anything other than a mac mini. The mac mini is a really nice little server that takes up no space and is totally silent – much better to live with than the dual xeon space heater I had to move out of my office.
- Boot off the Mac OS X Install DVD or from an external drive (I have a firewire drive with Mac OS X installed on it so this it is what I did). Go to the Utilities folder in Applications and launch Disk Utility if booting off an external drive, or if booting off the Install DVD select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
- Click on the disk you want to install CentOS on to, then select Partition tab, then select 1 partitions and choose MS-DOS (FAT) as the format. Then click options and select Master Boot Record. Then click on Apply when you are done. Don’t click outside of this tab before pressing Apply or you will lose the MBR setting.
- Once the partitioning is complete insert the first CentOS CD and reboot the mac mini.
- Go through the standard centos install as per normal.
On tip to watch for if you are behind a proxy like me is to not select to install the CentOS extras packages. What happens if you do is you get hung at this point of the install and will have to start over again from scratch. You can always install the extras latter by modifying the yum.conf file in /etc.
Sitting here trying to get XENServer and other linux based VM systems to run on the new MacMini 4.1.
I have hard time getting the Linux systems to recognize the SATA disks.
I followed the above guide but still no luck, can you point me in a direction on where or how to come about this?
I have the same issue. It ask me for sata driver and will not go any further. Should I use the external DVD drive instead of the internal?
Thanks,
Tony
It is hard to say I did the install using an external drive. It may not work if you have booted up using the install DVD.