Trouble Installing Ubuntu on Old MacBook Air

As HWTech says, what you want to do ought to be possible - it just seems not to be for you for some obscure reason...really a modern Ubuntu installer ought to recognize a HFS+ or APFS formatted drive just fine.

I suppose one thing you could try is to create a macOS USB Installer as HWTech suggests, use that to erase and reformat the SSD into something like MSDOS or EXFAT, and then try the Ubuntu installer and see if it recognizes the drive in that format...

Cord13 wrote:

Thanks for your reply—I really appreciate it. I was hoping to avoid installing rEFInd since my goal was to completely replace the outdated macOS with Ubuntu. However, it seems a normal installation isn’t possible, so I’ll seriously consider your advice.

rEFInd is only needed if you are dual booting, otherwise the default Ubuntu bootloader will be fine.

I had hoped the bootable USB with Ubuntu would simply wipe the old MacBook and install a fresh copy of Ubuntu, but the installer doesn’t detect the hard drive for some reason.

It can & should be able to do so. I haven't tried installing Ubuntu in a while so I forget the how the installer presents the drives to the user. There is usually an option to use the while drive which would have the installer completely erase the destination drive.

Are you saying the installer is not showing any physical drives other than the USB stick for the Ubuntu installer?

Is your internal SSD an original Apple OEM SSD or a third party SSD?

Can you take a picture of the Ubuntu installer on the disk selection screen & post it here?

It’s frustrating, and the other workarounds seem overly complicated. Your suggestion might be the simplest solution, though I wish I didn’t need two partitions or dual OS setups. The MacBook is old, and I just wanted to give it as much new life as possible.

Ubuntu or any Linux distribution can work just fine on an older Intel Mac (non-USB-C anyway) without macOS being required.

Before you erase the Mac, I highly recommend you first create a bootable macOS USB installer now while you still can just in case you have issues using Internet Recovery Mode. If you ever decide to go back, it may make things easier.

The few times I've done something similar (and this was only to play with multiboot options, mind you), my best success was to keep macOS to maintain the standard EFI and Recovery partitions, then more or less:

1. Re-partition the drive from Disk Utility to shrink the macOS partition down to a minimal amount (say 20GB or so);
2. Format the new partition for Linux as MSDOS;
3. Boot into the Linux Installer and install it into the MSDOS partition (using the installer to reformat the partition);
4. Install rEFInd and use it to set Linux as the boot OS, boot into macOS using the option key only if needed.

There is more nuance to it - but there are plenty of online guides that can fill in the details.

Cord13 wrote:

Thank you for the suggestion, g_wolfman. I know it’s a long shot, but using Disk Utility on my Mac to create the installer instead of Etcher seems logical. Hopefully, the Mac will create an installer that recognizes a Mac SSD.

You created the installer correctly by using Etcher. That should not be the issue here.

That Ubuntu installer layout screen is much different than the last one I saw a few years ago. How about trying to install Linux Mint to see how that works out. It is based on Ubuntu, but has some differences. It would be interesting to compare how the installer behaves. I haven't tried Linux Mint in a while either as I tend to focus on Debian instead.

What happens when you boot to the "Live" mode to see how Ubuntu runs from the USB stick image. It will be slow, but the goal is you will be booted into a full OS so you can have access to a full GUI interface and some more utilities than are available while booted to the installer. After booting Ubuntu into "Live" mode, open a terminal window and issue the following commands to get a bit more information about the system.

List the block devices such as SSDs:

sudo  lsblk  -f

Show the system boot log (filtering out just the problem stuff):

Not sure if this will work since it appears it may be a new option, but worth a try since it is less typing:

sudo  dmesg  --level=warn+

If the previous command failed, then use this one instead (must be no spaces between the level items):

sudo  dmesg  --level=emerg,alert,crit,err,warn

The information from both of these commands may provide some clues. Of course, the problem could be just with the installer itself, but at least this will confirm what the Linux kernel is seeing as regards to the hardware of this laptop.

There are a lot of known CPU bugs especially with the Intel CPUs (all CPUs have bugs/vulnerabilities), but that is probably not the problem, however, I cannot say since I can't see the error or its context. Many of those CPU bugs are not much of an issue for personal systems, but are a huge issue for shared systems.

You can also try looking at those logs without any options to see where the system stalls or breaks down.

I've never seen that before, but I thought the problem was that the Ubuntu installer was not seeing your internal SSD?

Are there any more issues listed?

Your picture cuts off right at the detecting at least one SATA or USB drive (sda). As long as the installer is booting and working, then I would not bother with the GPU issue until you confirm Ubuntu has an issue after installation is complete.

You may also need to review the boot log without any filters just to get more details in case the drives are being detected. It has been a while since I filtered for internal drive entries, but you can try the following to see if it narrows down the log entries to just USB & ATA/AHCI devices, unfortunately I don't have access to a Linux system to confirm the "-Ht" options are correct:

sudo  dmesg  -Ht  |  grep -iE '^ata|^sd|^ahci'

I've never had any issues with installing Linux onto the non-USB-C Macs. I gave up on Ubuntu years ago and only very briefly installed Ubuntu onto an external drive back in 2020. I don't recall exactly how the Ubuntu installer handles the selection & partitioning of the destination drive....besides it has probably changed since then anyway.

Are you saying that the physical internal SSD is not seen at all within the Ubuntu installer to show the Apple partition(s)?

Have you ever installed Ubuntu or any Linux distribution before? If so, was it on bare metal or within a VM?

Just out of curiosity try Linux Mint. If that has the same issue, then try Debian stable. This is just to compare with what Ubuntu is showing.

It has been a while since I installed Linux, so I don't recall what utilities are available within the installer. While booted to the Linux installer, switch to another TTY so you can try running a command like:

lsblk  -f

to list the block devices which should show the internal SSD and the Linux USB stick installer as well as possibly some other items. You may even want to switch to the TTY where the system log is shown, or to scroll through the log to see what it may show regarding the internal SSD.

Perhaps even take a picture of the screen showing the available physical drives and their current partitions.

Maybe try installing Ubuntu onto an external drive just to see how that install goes. If you can boot Linux externally, then you can check to see how the internal SSD appears to Ubuntu when booted to the full OS. You can even try selecting the "Live" option from the Installer to boot to a demo mode in order to have more utilities available than the installer in order to check & assess the internal SSD (such as confirming the physical SSD can be seen and to more easily check the system log to see if any errors are shown regarding the internal SSD).

Is the internal SSD the original Apple OEM SSD, or a third party SSD. If the latter, what is the exact make & model and if an SSD adapter is used, what brand is it?

Cord13 wrote:

1. Yes, the internal SSD is not seen at all by the installer.  It just sees itself (the USB drive that the Ubuntu installer is on).

Try the "Live" option when booting the Linux installer. The full OS may show things differently than the installer portion, plus you have access to more utilities in the "Live" boot option of the installer.

You can also try booting from a Knoppix Linux USB stick to see what Knoppix sees of the internal SSD. New versions of Knoppix are only released many years apart, so it will have an older setup just in case some kernel change or configuration settings was introduced which affects the ability to see the internal SSD for some reason. It is best to use the " lsblk -f " command to show the block devices to see if the internal SSD is shown. Please show a picture of the output whether this is done using Knoppix, the "Live" boot option of the Linux installer, or from a TTY while attempting to install Linux.

Also, please post a picture of the installer's partitioning screen where it lists all of the attached drives available for use.

FYI, when booting Knoppix on a Mac, you need to give Knoppix lots of time to finish booting since Knoppix is unable to display the early boot screen on a Mac (for about 15 seconds or so it will be paused at a command prompt to provide the user time to customize the Knoppix boot options, but the text only portion of the boot process will be hidden until a bit later as well).

4. I am a newbie to all of this and I am not sure what you mean by TTY.

See this post here for a bit of an explanation:

https://askubuntu.com/a/66198

Basically they are just terminal sessions. The installer typically uses two of them. One for the boot/install log, one for the GUI interface session, with several more available for use in order for the user to perform actions outside of the official install process. These are just command line sessions & access.