CentOS 7 On Older Macbook Pro

Home » CentOS » CentOS 7 On Older Macbook Pro
CentOS 9 Comments

Hi all,

I recently got a brand new MacBook Pro, replacing one that is over 5.5
years old. I’m trying to think of something to do with the old laptop, and one idea I had was to put CentOS on it. After some initial struggles, I finally found this page, which tells how to tell the installer to find hfsplus-utils:

https://bugs.CentOS.org/view.php?ids27

Then I got to the point of configuring wifi, and of course being a MBP, it has a proprietary Broadcom interface. I followed the instructions on the wiki (https://wiki.CentOS.org/HowTos/Laptops/Wireless/Broadcom), but had some trouble with it coming back up after a sleep. That plus some other issues (it ran hot just running a browser, for example) are making me question whether this is a good idea.

Does anyone else run a CentOS (not necessarily 7) on Apple hardware, particularly laptops (and not in a VM)? If so, any pointers on making life easier? TBH I don’t really know exactly what I want to use it for yet, so suggestions there would be helpful too.

–keith

9 thoughts on - CentOS 7 On Older Macbook Pro

  • This doesn’t really help with your problem, but to address the specific question below:

    I run CentOS 7, and previously 6, on a Mac Pro (MacPro4,1). My experience has been good. I haven’t bothered running anything to read hfs volumes as I’m not dual-booting it. I have a separate MacBook Pro machine for my OS X needs.

    We run mostly CentOS for servers, but on the desktop side of things we are fairly Mac heavy. I wanted something decent to run a CentOS desktop and this hardware was available at the time.

  • Well, I explicitly don’t want to do that, since it uses even more resources than OS X by itself. Having linux run on the bare metal without OS X should be much more efficient.

    As sometimes happens, I wrote too soon. I think the wifi issue may have been a misconfiguration on my part, and so far Firefox has been fine. It could have been a transient issue that I unintentionally resolved.

    I was really surprised to see that streaming video and audio worked without having to do anything. And even KDE has not been too much of a dog so far, though I’m still thinking to install something like fluxbox or blackbox. I actually haven’t had a linux desktop in a long time so I’m very much out of practice.

    So far, after the first hiccups, CentOS 7 has been much faster on the old MBP than OS X is. I’m optimistic that I can find a use for it, even if it’s just having a laptop I can use if my family wants the new MBP.

    –keith

  • Hi, I tried CentOS on a late 2008 MB, but quickly uninstalled it due to wifi/ethernet issues. I switched to Fedora 22 which installed nicely. I had to fiddle a bit for wifi, but I don’t recall the necessary steps…

    q

  • I believe you’re right about xfce. I’m so out of it I hadn’t even heard of MATE or Cinnamon. :) They seem more like DEs, what are folks using as straight window managers?

    I showed my son, who’s only really used OS X, focus follows mouse and autoraise. He was not as impressed as I was hoping. ;-)

    –keith

  • Blackbox hasn’t been developed in years. Fluxbox is still being developed though, and is still a nice desktop.

  • Yes, they’re DE’s. Openbox has probably replaced fluxbox as everyone’s favorite stacking window manager, and dwm is one of the better tiling ones.
    As mentioned, blackbox is no longer developed at all–I know it’s still available in FreeBSD ports, but haven’t installed it in years.

    I believe XFCE counts as a DE too. There’s also LXDE, which, as the DE
    indicates, is a desktop environment, but somewhat lighter.