I installed Ubuntu Linux on an old iMac over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Actually, I did most of the work on Thanksgiving day and cleaned it all up today (Friday)
This iMac was built in 2007and has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It had been sitting in the closet since we moved back to Oregon because it’s waaaaaay too slow for modern use. Since it was just collecting dust I decided to try this little experiment.
So I created a Ubuntu live CD (a boot disk) and installed the Re-Fit utility that allows Mac users to choose which OS/disk to boot from. Once I fired it up and booted to the Linux install, I just ran the installer and viola. A fresh and much faster desktop machine I can now use without having to spend a bunch of time watching the spinning beachball.
I hope to use the iMac as a media center, duties previously allotted to my Mac mini. The DVD drive on that mini crapped out recently so I was looking for replacements. We’ll see how XBMC and Plex work out.