Training is a big part of my life but there are other sides that I did not share. One of them is being a geek. For the last couple of years it stayed a bit dormant, hibernating, just to be awoken again the last couple of days. It was actually a fun getting my fingers “dirty” and my brain firing hacking together my old Macbookpro.

How did this start! I have an old faithful MacbookProv1.1 yup this is a per 2008 model and still kicks ass. The only issue is its DVD-drive. Along time ago it decided USB rules and it will go into retirement. I am still running Leopard on it and it still gives me all the functionalities that I need. I want to turn it however now into a media station and have it synced with my iPad.

1st hurdle came in here. iTunes does not allow me to upgrade to a later release on Leopard and I need to move to later release

2nd hurdle. DVD-rom is broken. Ok we will try a USB boot

3rd hurdle. It is such an old Mac and this BIOS/EFI does not recognize the USB at boot time

How to solve it.

Get curious and immerse yourself into the web. This again woke up the ability to dive in and quickly scan, search, research and absorb problems, hacks and solutions.

I decided to can OS-X and go back again to good old Linux and solve the hurdles one by one.

1st solution. Install a new EFI. Downloaded GRUB-rEFI. Installed it and check if it boots a USB. 1st reboot was not successful, but luckily I did not give up, went throughout the troubleshooting pages and managed to solve it. The answer was: reboot twice …. Ok

2nd solution. Download Ubuntu (will give this a try now maybe switch back to Debian later) and prepare a USB installation drive. This was easy. I also prepared a snowleopard installation USB drive. This I had to do on my work doze pc running xp. But to create a DMG file, I had to use Transmac to run on doze to format the USB drive and create the DMG image on it. My backup plan.

3rd solution. Successfully install Linux and start creating the media station. Successful.

Then another hurdle stupid iTunes does not run on Linux and now I don’t want to wine, but it looks like I have to if I want to sync with the iPad. So for now the best solution is Wine with an iTunes.exe, until something better pops up.

So now I run Linux on my MacbookPro and I use all the Google Apps (Gmail, Drive, Chrome) on my iPad and I am loving it.