Jake had an older MacBook laptop that was sitting around collecting dust.
Nothing was really wrong with it, aside from the fact that the original hard-drive went bad, so it wouldn’t boot into OSX.
After looking around a bit, we realized that the hard-drive in my old ASUS laptop was compatible, and we decided to install it to see if we could get the laptop fired up again.
Once we located the old OSX 10.4 install CD and re-installed the hard drive, we were able to start re-installing OSX. Everything was going flawlessly, until OSX asked for Install DVD 2, which we’d lost somewhere along the line. The install couldn’t proceed without DVD 2, so I tried reinstalling, and unchecking everything but the “Base System” in the install options, and this did the trick.
Well, once OSX was fully installed, we started to realize: this computer, with this operating system…isn’t really good for anything. Because it’s a Core2 Duo processor, you can’t install a newer version of OSX on it. Unfortunately, no modern browsers will work on OSX Tiger, and no modern software will either. So, we decided to install Linux on it.
By far the best way to install Linux on the MacBook is via a CD/DVD. We attempted the USB method (Which Ubuntu recommended against), and this didn’t work, so I burned Ubuntu 12.04 (the 32 bit version) onto a DVD and popped it in the drive. I didn’t want to try anything newer due to the fact that the MacBook only has 1 GB of ram, and newer versions of Ubuntu might tax it – even so, you would be able to run modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and other applications without an issue.
Much to my shock, the install proceeded completely normally. When the system boots, it 
still boots with the characteristic Apple chime. It shows the folder with a question mark for a few seconds, then proceeds to boot directly into Ubuntu, where, shockingly, everything still works as it should – the sound, the mouse and keyboard, the disk drives, the USB ports, the WiFi – it all works flawlessly. The battery, after nearly two years of being completely discharged, is in need of replacement, but other than that, this machine is completely serviceable.
Confronted with this newly revived and still excellent MacBook powered by Ubuntu Linux, Jake decided to buy 4GB of ram to upgrade it, along with a Solid State Hard Drive. These should be arriving shortly, and we’ll do a video of the entire install procedure for anyone interested.
Used to edit this post 🙂
So, in short, if you have an old Mac laptop laying around, it’s not useless. You can install the free Linux distribution called Ubuntu very easily, everything will work, and your computer will be useful once more.
Update: We just installed a solid state drive and upped the ram to 2GB. One of the ram ports was damaged. So, we weren’t able to take advantage of dual 2GB ram. However, it’s a huge improvement over the original 1GB total. This thing rocks! Jake has been using it for a few days now editing photos and posting to this site. It’s running great.