Macbook partitions and installing Linux
by paulgault from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6HKS1)
Hey! Hopefully a quick question. I bagged myself a cheap Macbook as the Intel based ones are going cheap these days, what with people wanting the shiny new Apple Silicon. It's a early 2015 MacBook Air with 8 gigs of ram for i130 (about US$160). Am quite pleased and it's still got about 12 months of support life left in it from Apple (only up to V12 Monterey though), but I plan on keeping it alive much longer with my current distro of choice, Manjaro.
I've installed various Linux distros over the years but never on an old MacBook.
It's a bit odd not having any Bios settings to twiddle with. I normally just delete all partitions on the drive that's going to be the boot disk, and either set up the partitions how I want them or just let the Linux installer auto do them for me.
As there's no Bios, I'm a little wary of deleting all the partitions in case some are needed to boot (the EFI partition maybe?). I don't want to brick the device.
My current partition table is below.
Q) When installing Linux, will I be ok deleting all the partitions like i normally do, or should I just delete some of them?
Any advice would be appreciated.
thanks,
Paul.
Code:Last login: Wed Jan 3 22:19:38 on ttys000
slinky$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 121.1 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +121.1 GB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Internal - Data 38.9 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 480.6 MB disk1s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 1.1 GB disk1s3
4: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk1s4
5: APFS Volume Internal 15.4 GB disk1s5
6: APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 15.4 GB disk1s5s1
I've installed various Linux distros over the years but never on an old MacBook.
It's a bit odd not having any Bios settings to twiddle with. I normally just delete all partitions on the drive that's going to be the boot disk, and either set up the partitions how I want them or just let the Linux installer auto do them for me.
As there's no Bios, I'm a little wary of deleting all the partitions in case some are needed to boot (the EFI partition maybe?). I don't want to brick the device.
My current partition table is below.
Q) When installing Linux, will I be ok deleting all the partitions like i normally do, or should I just delete some of them?
Any advice would be appreciated.
thanks,
Paul.
Code:Last login: Wed Jan 3 22:19:38 on ttys000
slinky$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 121.1 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +121.1 GB disk1
Physical Store disk0s2
1: APFS Volume Internal - Data 38.9 GB disk1s1
2: APFS Volume Preboot 480.6 MB disk1s2
3: APFS Volume Recovery 1.1 GB disk1s3
4: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk1s4
5: APFS Volume Internal 15.4 GB disk1s5
6: APFS Snapshot com.apple.os.update-... 15.4 GB disk1s5s1