Okay, so while we were cleaning our lab up after a year's worth of experimentation, we found a bag of old hardware no one has used for quite a long while. And lo behold, I came across a Mac mini, late 2009 model. It has a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs RAM, a 320 gigs HDD and an nvidia 9600 GPU. All pretty standard for the system. My prof gave me the go ahead to take it home and have some fun with it.

So, since I don't have a desktop, I was planning on making it my home workstation. However, from what I've read online, this model doesn't exactly play well with Yosemite. So I have 2 options:

1. I can open it up, replace the HDD with an SDD and bump up the RAM to 8 gigs
2. Or I can keep it as it is and install some variant of Linux

So what do you guys suggest I do? I'd like to keep OSX on, but is it possible installing it on a blank SSD? Also, if I do this, then will Yosemite run smoothly? I don't wanna keep it on Mavericks, and I don't want lag. I'd go with either Arch or Debian if I can't get OSX to behave.

 

With an SSD and more RAM, that model should run Yosemite just fine. Buy a USB enclosure for the SSD and connect it to the mac mini that way. Then download Yosemite from the Mac App Store, run it, and make sure you choose the SSD as the install location.

 

The existing install is in Japanese, and I'd want English systemwide. I'm not well versed with OSX, and I don't know if I can simply change the system language of an existing install. Is it possible to install from a USB disk or something similar after swapping the drives like in Linux?

Thanks for the reply, though! I'll definitely be keeping OSX on it now!

 

You can install from a usb drive, but creating the usb drive needs to be done from OSX. To do this, you'll probably need to switch your language to english in the existing install first. The quickest way to do this is probably as follows:

1. Click the apple in the top left. One of the options is system preferences. Getting this one is probably the hardest part.
2. In system preferences, there should be a flag in the first row. This will be the languages preferences pane.
3. Here, drag English to the top of the list. If it's not there, click the plus, find it, and add it. After that, restart your computer and it should be in English.

I made a quick screenshot album so you can see what it looks like in English. I'm running Yosemite, so it'll be slightly different, but it might help a bit.

http://imgur.com/a/tfOq8

There's a guide for actually creating the bootable usb here.

 

Thanks a lot. I won't be doing it anytime soon (I'll probably devote my whole attention to it and allow some of my projects to suffer), but I will keep this in mind. I'll do it sometime in March, when I go back home. My father has a macbook pro on him, and I imagine I'll be able to create a bootable disk from there to wipe my mini.

Again, thanks a lot for your help. I'm good with Linux and Windows, but this will be my first OSX machine. And if I like it, I might switch to the entire OSX/iOS world, given that I am, frankly, a bit sick of tiny deficiencies in Android (lack of a good email client, for one) and Windows (It's not Unix).

 

You could do this but USBs don't have the best data tranfser speeds. The speed of the SSD would be made irreleavant by the speed of data transfer.

I have an old iMac G3 (1998 ) and I installed Arch on it after upgrading its hardware a bit and it actually runs quite well. For you, with a much newer mac I think upgrading its hardware and then chucking Arch on it will give much better performance. If you installed openbox or a lightweight DE or WM your mac will run best.

OSX comes with too much bloatware this will reduce your machines performance. Just something to keep in mind when you make your decision.

 

Since Yosemite doesn't cost anything, I'll install it once. I've been an Archer for 5 years now (I reinstalled once after the switch to systemd), and I love Linux. My preferred WM is openbox. However, you got to admit that OSX does benefit from better GUI applications. Sure, I can read my email on mutt quite fine (I do that on my laptop), and run FF and Libreoffice and the Gimp and even LaTeX, but I'd like to use MS Office once in a while, install Photoshop, get my mail on mail.app and still have zsh, tmux and vim on iterm.

However, if it doesn't work well, then Arch is always going to be my second choice. I'm too far invested in it to switch to any other distro.

Edit: How did you install Arch on a PPC architecture based Mac?

 

I mostly relied on the Arch Linux PowerPC wiki but I just checked it a moment ago and it has been deleted.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Talk:Official_Install_Guide_on_a_PowerPC

I also used an ISO that was specifally made for PPC based systems. Although I'm not sure if the website that hosted the ISOs still exists.

 

I meant to install Yosemite this way, and then install the SSD into the Mac Mini, if that wasn't clear.

 

I thought you meant to run the OS off of an external SSD. Sorry, I read you post wrong.