Success with Debian 12.4.

[gatk555]

No issue to report, but this seems the way to thank you for documenting this. Many Thanks!

I have just used this guide with Debian 12.4 netiinst and things seem to have improved: Wayland is not installed, for a start. (I would remove it even if it worked. What is it for?) I did encounter some problems:

1. The machine was very reluctant to boot from the Debian CD: it was either ignored or booted to a "Choose boot method" menu with keyboard not working and no mouse. Eventually, I removed the internal battery, and with frequent removal of all power (count to 10) and PRAM resets was able to make progress. Perhaps this a quirk of one machine.

2. You have to load the b43 firmware from USB before the wireless network can be configured, so "Expert Install". (You mentioned this, but in my house the router is in an awkward place.)

3. After the first apparent success the machine booted, but stopped in initrd, unable to mount the root partition. There were no kernel modules in there! On a retry, I selected the option to put all modules into initrd. After that, no problem, and it has survived a kernel upgrade.

4. Not iMac-specific, but I struggled to enable middle-button emulation for the mouse. Xorg.conf entries seem to be ignored. I eventually made it work with an xinput command in a root script run by lightdm during login. The same script makes a /sys file user-writeable to that the backlight can be controlled from the command line. It does not seem controllable through X.

[jmstriegel]

Thanks for the note! I recently did a full upgrade (just using apt, not a reinstall) to the latest Debian using apt, and things went well. What's interesting is that there somehow (!?!) seems to be active development on the video driver, and I've now been able to get Wayland working on this machine. I'm curious to see if the new driver works under EFI boot.

[gatk555]

How do you check for working acceleration? Mine does only light browsing and (2D) game duties so I would probably never notice, but I am curious. Thanks, G.