Good work! We have a black MacBook from the same era at our house; my girlfriend uses Ubuntu on it as her main computer. Should have thought about blogging about it!<p>That 32-bit EFI with 64-bit CPU is a real curse for installing recent Linux (although Ubuntu did release &quot;amd64+mac&quot; ISO images for these computers, I think even 14.04 is available this way).<p>Additionally, my internal DVD drive for this MacBook failed, so I had to use an external DVD drive for booting said Ubuntu. It had the weirdest bug -- you had to reboot from rEFInd three times for the EFI boot to recognize that the external DVD drive has a bootable DVD in it. First time, it won&#x27;t see it, second time, it won&#x27;t see it, and on the third reboot, it magically does.<p>The reason is likely because the drive spins up too slow and the EFI boot timeouts unless the drive is powered up from an earlier spinup.<p>Besides the internal drive failing, the machine with Ubuntu on it is perfectly usable as a main laptop for a student. It shows how the laptop scene did not improve that much in the last 9 years -- and that one can save quite a bit of money if he buys a reliable machine and treats it well.