Is Mac Mini MC270*/A well supported?

jronald

jronald

Are the following hardware devices supported?

  • Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz(P8600)
  • Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet
  • NVIDIA Geforce 320M Broadcom 802.11a/b/g/n
 
The Core2 is supported.
Try the bgm driver.

Install the system to the MacMini and then report any problems that you may encounter after looking for the possible solutions.
 
The NVidia card shouldn't be a problem. There are a bunch of Broadcom wired and wireless cards supported:
Code: 
root@molly:~# man -k broadcom
bce(4)                   - Broadcom NetXtreme II (BCM5706/5708/5709/5716) PCI/PCIe Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver
bcmfw(8)                 - firmware download utility for Broadcom BCM2033 chip based Bluetooth USB devices
bfe(4)                   - Broadcom BCM4401 Ethernet Device Driver
bge(4)                   - Broadcom BCM57xx/BCM590x Gigabit/Fast Ethernet driver
bwi(4)                   - Broadcom BCM43xx IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network driver
bwn(4)                   - Broadcom BCM43xx IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network driver
bxe(4)                   - Broadcom BCM57710/BCM57711/BCM57711E 10Gb Ethernet adapter driver
ubsec(4)                 - Broadcom and BlueSteel uBsec 5x0x crypto accelerator
ubtbcmfw(4)              - Firmware driver for Broadcom BCM2033 chip based Bluetooth USB devices

Not sure which ones you need but you should be able to get it to work.
 
I'll make a test enviroment first some day, because the network card doesn't work by default, then no help from the net.:)
 
I suspect the more interesting thing you'll run into is trying to make it boot. You'll need to faff around with "rEFIt" (?) to ensure the boot record, etc. is updated properly.

I've been meaning to get my old 2007 spec Mini up and running on FreeBSD - with that the NIC was detected and everything else seemed OK (other than WiFi out of the box) but it wouldn't boot from the hard drive and I didn't spend too much time trying.
 
throAU said:
I suspect the more interesting thing you'll run into is trying to make it boot. You'll need to faff around with "rEFIt" (?) to ensure the boot record, etc. is updated properly.
Click to expand...

Nope - you just need to "bless" the FreeBSD boot partition which gets harder now that OS X is not distributed on CD/DVD as you need an OS X installation disc.

Full Recipe
  1. Boot into an OS X installation DVD with internal/external DVD.
  2. Choose language >> Utilities >> Disk Utility.
  3. Select HDD >> Partition >> 1 Partition >> Options >> Master Boot Record >> Apply >> Partition.
  4. Quit the installation process.
  5. Boot the FreeBSD CD from an external DVD drive (otherwise unable to eject CD as camcontrol eject does not work).
  6. Install FreeBSD and choose "use whole disk".
  7. Boot into the OSX installation DVD again.
  8. Choose a language >> Utilities >> Terminal.
  9. Enter diskutil list >> look for the FreeBSD boot partition of 64 KB (like /dev/disk0sX).
  10. Enter bless --device /dev/diskXXX --setBoot --legacy (where diskXXX is the identifier you found above).
  11. Quit the installation process.
  12. Reboot.
 
Last edited:
rEFIt worked with my old black MacBook, but it affected boots and shutdowns. rEFInd didn't work because of the older EFI. The only thing I had to keep in mind for my situation was /dev/ada0p1 in FreeBSD was /dev/disk0s1 in Mac OS X.
 
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