Mac mini core solo dual boot

Hi all. Potentially silly question.

In my seemingly ever expanding computer museum I have ye olde Mac mini core solo. Yes they did sell these for like two months. I was working in southern California at the time and couldn’t resist it stupidly. Really underpowered, but an interesting piece of history.

As it’s a museum piece I don’t really want to remove MacOS on it, but equally it’s so woefully underpowered I’d quite like to use it as my main Haiku dev box. I used it as a media client for an old TV for a few years but its been sat around for a while now.

Is there a dual boot strategy and install approach here anyone could recommend please?

Thanks.

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Isn’t this essentially the original “Apple TV” hardware? That is probably reasonably similar. Oh, Apple…

I think people are using refind… there was a Mac thread recently on the forum. Haiku on Mac - #104 by humungus

Wonderful! Thank you. I couldn’t find that searching the forums for some reason. Thanks for the link, I’ll take a look.

As for the hardware, it’s this (The Solo):
https://support.apple.com/kb/SP34?locale=en_GB

rEFInd works, I used it in the past. With the new beta 3 it is not needed anymore.
Tested with late 2017 iMac and 2010 Mac mini booting from an USB stick.

rEFInd is only needed for UEFI booting. I think this one is bios based?

I have this exact machine setup for multi-boot (via refind)
Snow leopard
Haiku
debian
puppy linux

Its 32 bit EFI

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I think every Intel Mac, past the dev kits maybe, was EFI based

Right. If it’s a 32 bit EFI it can only boot by using Boot Camp.

I used to boot a 32 bit core duo (not core 2 duo) macbook into haiku, linux, windows XP and OS X using refind. The only one of those OSs that knew about EFI at the time was OS X, so its certainly possible.

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FYI, I just updated my Mac Mini to Beta 3 and it will not boot without setting the graphics to safe mode.

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Thinking about it, I think I used refit not refind, but I think that was all that was available back then.