Russell HamptonJun 10, 2025
@John So true! I fancied a change from the excellent #Zorin17.3 today and switched to #UbuntuBudgie 24.04 Its actually pretty good...Works great on my #MacBookPro2010
vrtxdSep 29, 2024
Dad updated his laptop a month back and gave me his previous #MacBookPro2010 . I wiped it, bought a used 256 GB SSD and installed it, and set up #Debian 12 #GNOME + #macOS 12 dual boot with #OCLP . Upgrading 4 GB β†’ 16 GB RAM and replacing the DVD drive with a second hard drive is possible but not really needed for now. I found out about someone who was in need of a laptop, so it went there today for the time being. Chance of more #Linux users! 🐧
richJan 14, 2024

OK, some gentle reminders on making everything work. The first is that if you are using Google Workspace, you currently have to allow Bard for all your users. This also enables Google AI Studio which you can use to manage your prompts for vision and test them and NotebookLM which is similar to the studio but for

This is buried in the admin setup, but go to Google Workspace > Admin Console > Apps > Additional Google services > Early Access Apps, click this on and, then press Turn On.

MacOS Setup checklist

Man the list is actually pretty huge, but the basics are:

  • System Settings > Your Name > iCloud. Turn on all the "Apps Using iCloud". Note you have to wait for each toggle to move, you will have to wait a bit until the spinning daisy ends and note that the behavior on Sonoma is a little weird as the button will show off and then suddenly move again. These include iCloud Private Relay, Find My Mac, Calendars, Reminders, Safari, News, Notes,
  • System Settings > General > Sharing. I turn file sharing, media sharing, screen sharing, and Remote login on so I can manage it and look at the local hostname to make sure it looks correct. You correct the name in a completely different place in System Settings > General > About and the name is an editable text box although it looks grey. To make sharing easier, I also renamed the disk to the same as the hostname so when you access it you can tell where it came from.
  • System Settings > Control Center. This sort of strangely is where the menu bar settings are such as turning off Battery in the menu bar, showing keyboard brightness
  • System Settings > Network > Firewall. Turn this on
  • Systems Settings > Privacy & Security > FileVault so your disk is encrypted
  • System Settings > Internet Accounts. Add your Google account (or Microsoft if you must :-), it will have a suggestion list which is all the accounts it's seen before. You definitely want to do this early so you get your contacts and things populated.

    • Brew's many convenience applications

    Everyone has their own, but my list after the brew install is:

  • Coconut Battery. This is a better battery icon and tells you how much potential charge you have. Remove the system battery and make this run at startup.
  • Aldente. To keep your battery at 70% and save cycles. Make this run at startup.
  • Rectangle. For keyboard shortcuts to manage tiled windows. Make this run at startup. For big displays, I also set the 1/6th screen entries as Ctrl-Option-5 through 0 and this works well.
  • Dozer. To manage the mess that is your menubar. I use Bartender for Macs with a Notch. Make sure to set it to run at startup.
  • Authy. For two-factor authentication across multiple devices
  • AVG Antivirus. Decent and free. The setup is pretty arduous so be patient on slow machines. There are lots of permissions you need to give it, so make sure to use brew or the website to download it.
  • Google Chrome, Brave Browser, and Firefox. I use Chrome when I'm really in trouble, but Brave is great for multiple identities and doesn't leak content. I use Firefox because I love keyboard shortcut
  • Stats. To monitor CPU usage on the menubar'
  • iterm2. Because I can't stand the regular terminal. Then I turn on the Solarized Dark theme
  • neovim. This requires lots of setup, but it is much less painful than vi
  • bash. This is a later one and requires editing /etc/shell to enable but worth it.
  • Open Core Legacy Patcher. This normally gets blown away on installation and this gives you the latest one.

    • Then for paid applications. As an aside if you do buy these check Cashback Monitor as there are usually huge savings (like 60% off) especially for NordVPN:"

  • 1Password. Yes if only use Macs, you can use the Apple one, but this is pretty indispensable. You want to get this going right away so you can use Passkeys and the other passwords
  • Bartender. As I said above if you have a notch Mac. Make sure to pick launch on startup.
  • NordVPN. VPNs are pretty necessary. I turn on Threat Protection, Autoconnect and launch on start-up.
  • Superhuman. It's expensive, but you get to love it if you are a keyboard geek

    • This magical command will do it all after you do the brew install by copying the script at brew.sh

    brew install coconutbattery aldente rectangle dozer authy nordvpn avg-antivirus google-chrome google-drive brave-browser firefox opencore-patcher neovim superhuman bash

    Brave and Firefox Sync

    Well, this is simple for the Mac, but since I'm setting up so many machines with the upgrade to Ventura on my old Macs, but in order to get everything working, you need to:

  • Brave Sync Chain. Go to Settings > Sync > Sync Everything and then it will want a sync chain prompt. You should have one for your other browsers so save that in 1Password, you need to get a new 25th word all the time and the application by Alex Barabash gives it to you, so just store the 24 words and then add the last one.
  • Firefox Sync. Log in and go to Settings > Sync and make sure to select Sync all.
  • Safari Sync. You should have picked this up from System Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Safari

    • iMessage, Facetime, Mail and Contacts

    OK, now you have to the setup for the communications applications, at a minimum:

  • iMessage. Go to iMessage > Settings > iMessage > Enable iMessage in iCloud
  • iPhoto. Start it up so it can start syncing your photos

    • OLCP Maintenance

    OK, you will get new versions of OpenCore Legacy Patcher very so often and you have to do two things:

  • Start Opencore-patcher and have it build OpenCore and this will put new stuff in the boot partitions (these are tiny 200MB portions). You want this on both your USB flash drive and on the root partition of your machine.
  • Install root patches. YOu want this on the boot drive so it gets the latest fixes. YOu should only do this after installing a new operating system. Beware that I tried this with Sonoma and it ended up corrupting the system so do this sparingly.

    • Note that on really slow machines like a MacBook Pro 2010, don't be too alarmed, you will get a grey screen for 20 seconds before it really boots, so don't panic.

    Share this:

    https://tongfamily.com/2024/01/14/web-new-google-workspace-ai-browser-sync-and-olcp-updates/

    #homebrew #macbookPro2010 #olcp

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    Rich Tong β€οΈπŸ€·β€β™‚οΈJan 14, 2024
    web: New Google Workspace AI, browser sync and OLCP updates
    OK, some gentle reminders on making everything work. The first is that if you are using Google Workspace, you currently have to allow Bard for all your users. This also enables Google AI Studio which you can use to manage your prompts for vision and test them and NotebookLM which is sim
    https://tongfamily.com/2024/01/14/web-new-google-workspace-ai-browser-sync-and-olcp-updates/
    #ai #Geek #mac #web #homebrew #MacbookPro2010 #olcp
    richJan 8, 2024

    Well, I've had some pretty good luck with OCLP to update old Macs to the latest MacOS Ventura, and Sonoma. Right now I've got running and it's a pretty good list. The main thing to do is to make sure you are using the latest Open Core Legacy Patcher. So the idea is you get the latest operating system that is supported, then you do a brew install opencore-patcher and then you download the more advanced operating system, you create a USB key with it, and then download the OpenCore patches into the EFI boot so that it all works. This is kind of tricky but there are outstanding issues for each of these to pay attention to:

  • MacBook Pro 2017 (MacBook Pro14,3). Apple has been closing up support for Intel-based Macs pretty quickly, so even my relatively new 2017 MacBook Pro does not run Sonoma. I've not yet upgraded it to Sonoma as Ventura seems just fine for it and I wanted to stay off the bleeding edge. The biggest thing is Legacy Metal on Sonoma where they are trying to do graphic acceleration.
  • MacBook Pro 2014 (MacBookPro11,3). This is also running Ventura and seems to be relatively reliable which is kind of amazing. There are Legacy Metal issues are the same here as with the MacBook Pro 2017, so we will move to Ventura if and when these are resolved.
  • MacBook Air 2012 (MacBookAir5,2). This is running Ventura as well and seems stable and has the same Legacy Metal as the without above.
  • Mac mini 2011 (Macmini16,1). This thing runs slow with 8GB of memory and a slow processor, but it does work. I'm not super surprised that this is slow, but it is sure nice to be able to do brew installs for instance because the tooling is the same. I was having lots of trouble with building simple things. The big work here is for non-metal GPUs to provide GPU Acceleration. The main stability issue is that graphics switching doesn't work and you have to lock into one of the GPUs. This is not a problem with the Mac mini which only has a single GPU.
  • MacBook Pro 2010 (MacBookPro6,2). This one was unstable with GPU Panics for Ventura and Sonoma but seems to work with High Sierra, so I think that I'm going to keep going backward until I find some stability. It is probably going to be High Sierra where we started because of the graphics drive. This has the dual GPU problem so it looks like the fix is to work to disable the discrete GPU for now until this gets fixed by always using the Intel-integrated GPU

    • Disable the dGPU on MacBook Pro 2010 (MacBookPro6,2)

    The main thing to do is that you have to boot to single-user mode or recovery mode and run this command to disable the dGPU. The main issue is that you can't use the external display anymore with this fix, but for me that's not a big deal, so do a reboot and hold the Command-S key and then type:

    nvram FA4CE28D-B62F-4C99-9CC3-6815686E30F9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00

    Gotchas: Follow the instructions closely, first download

    The main gotcha is that the order of the things is a little strange.

    First of all, before you can start with the upper right item, you need to go to the lower left and download the operating system you want. This then does an installation into the USB key that you should have plugged in. It will do the download and copy the Install application over to the USB. I also usually copy the Open Core Legacy Patcher application from /Applications as well in case I need it.

    Then you just do a reboot holding the Option key down and selecting the EFI application and ignore all the other entries, you have to do the EFI Entry

    There is going to be a huge list of items when you do the reboot, but you need to look for the USB icon which is kind of orange, and look for the words EFI which is the boot sector and it should take you through setup.

    Disk images all over the place

    If you are doing a ground-zero installation, I found that the Disk Utility in the Command-R mode would leave disks all over the place, so make sure to choose the left arrow to see all and delete all partitions except for the SSD and the "container" drive and then create an AFPS partition there before starting the installation.

    Sonoma is a complete work in progress, stick with Ventura

    My MacBook Pro 2010 and MacBook Pro 2014 were my test machine running Sonoma and it does seem to have a hardware panic that crashes it regularly. It is a bleeding-edge system, so with the 2010, it was probably this dGPU issue and with 2014, I was using OLCP 0.6 and the new OLCP 1.3 might be better, but in any case, it was pretty early to be using Sonoma.

    While I did the MacBook Pro 2010 to boot, Bluetooth didn't work even when the GPU switch didn't get me. Also when I booted it up, Bluetooth didn't work, but a PRAM reset with Command-Option-P-R did the trick.

    High Sierra Network Boot Recovery doesn't work

    One note is that when I lost it, the Command-Option-R recovery didn't work because it couldn't find the Internet download for MacOS High Sierra. This is because Apple has taken down the High Sierra recovery in the cloud. Sigh, so I had to download an installer and put it on a USB key. So you want to make sure to have this software somewhere as these are really old machines.

    https://tongfamily.com/2024/01/08/mac-new-life-for-macbooks-2010-2017-with-opencore-legacy-patcher/

    #macbookPro2010 #opencoreLegacyPatcher

    Mac: OLCP Update, Sticky Trackpad and Bartender vs Dozer

    OK, two quick things, I have a long post coming up on getting your Apple Home devices to work (tl;dr this is way, way, way too hard). OpenCore Legacy Patcher

    Tong Family