I have an old iMac that I am planning to install some flavor of Linux on and while I was looking at various distros it occurred to me that it might be a good exercise to install Gentoo on it. Other than a separate machine for documentation and downloading the necessary packages, what else should I have set up to try this? Has anyone installed Gentoo on a Mac before? If so, what concerns are there related to things like Apple’s implementation of EFI?
You’ll need to be a bit more specific about the iMac. What year is it?
If it’s pre-2017, I’d expect some difficulty with the WiFi. If it’s newer, you might have luck with https://wiki.t2linux.org/distributions/gentoo/installation/ . I haven’t followed that guide, so YMMV.
It’s a 2015 Retina 27”.
I’m fine rocking Ethernet for the purposes of this experiment.
Go for it then! Gentoo is a blast (if you enjoy this sort of thing) and is surprisingly stable once you get it set up.
One tip, before I forget, is to save your firmware from MacOS before wiping the drive. Unfortunately I don’t remember where it’s located, and no longer have access to try and find it 😅
You can easily add Wifi with a USB dongle anyway. Hardly a hurdle.