I believe I bought it in the summer of 2009.Īgain, note, this worked for me and my machine but may not for you. Note that I didn't want to partition my hard drive to allow myself to dual-boot either in OS X or Ubuntu- I was going for a full replacement, and thus would and did lose all the files on applications I had on the old Mac.īut regardless, here is the process I took. I now realize, I think, that the reason the process of installing even a popular Linux distribution on a common (if old) model computer isn't written out or easily findable is that the process is a bit different for everyone, depending on the distro, the version, and the hardware you're starting with. I also, confusingly, hadn't found a clean, step-by-step guide for doing this, so I promised I'd write my process out as thoroughly but simply as I could once I got it done. I had never installed or even used Linux before (to my knowledge). I had an old 17-inch MacBook Pro from 2009 (college) lying around and I figured it'd be a fun challenge to install Linux on it.

How to install linux on old macbook pro