Mac Mini mid 2010 - long boot times

roel · October 11, 2024 at 6:28 PM

Hello,

I installed LE11 and upgraded to LE12 on the mac mini mid 2010. But it seems to boot very slow. I tried other linux distro's and they boot at normal speed, similar to the mac os. So something in the boot proces keeps it occupied. Anybody an idea. The only thing I can think of is maybe the nvidia geforce m320 gpu.

Another question about the mini is the IR. Can I use another remote on the mini, because I don't have an official mac remote. I read somewhere that the macs only work with the mac remote, but maybe that's not the case with a linux distro.

Thanks in advance!

**chewitt** · October 12, 2024 at 1:39 PM

The system log shows kernel boot in six seconds, which is overall fast. That likely means the delay happens on the Apple firmware side; figuring out what EFI firmware bootloader to use. If other OS boot faster, perhaps see what bootloader they use and think about switching the LE install to use the same one. That might ential a little experimenting and reworking of boot config files, but the format of e.g. grub2 vs. syslinux are fairly similar so it's not impossible. There is of course no wiki article or nice HOWTO guide for that so you'll need to take the initiative.

The Apple IR receiver shows up as a Linux input device so you should be able to experiment with https://wiki.libreelec.tv/configuration/…ration-advanced to see if other remote devices are detectable (probably).

roel · October 13, 2024 at 11:36 AM

chewitt

thanks for the reply. I already thought it was something todo with the apple firmware. I already checked how to do efi stuff on mac but it seems there is not much documentation about it. The other OS I used was manjaro and it is on grub. Maybe it has something to do in which directory the efi files should be. I will check it out.

Regarding the remote, thanks for the info. I will fugure it out.

roel · October 13, 2024 at 5:05 PM

I see in the grub config this entry:

search --set -f /KERNEL

what's the meaning of -f /KERNEL

roel · October 18, 2024 at 7:12 PM

search --set -f /KERNEL in the grub.cfg just means grub shoul search the file "KERNEL"

Regarding the IR of the mac mini. Ir-keytable says "no devices found", so I would try lirc as it seems to have support for the mac mini, but LibreELEC Settings > Services > Lirc isn't there anymore.

OK, in a previous post I found lirc is automaticly enabled when you copy etc/lirc/lirc_option.conf to /storage/.config/lirc_option.conf

Time to update the wiki!