New OS on an old Mac Mini

For anybody that didn't know, I'm really pretty damn cheap... easy evidence of that can be found in things like the list of sale games I got last summer (and of course, another one of those is on the way for my winter Steam sale acquisitions, shortly).  So, when I got myself a new Mac Mini to replace the one I got way back in 2007, I wasn't about to just toss the old one, for all its specs are pretty puny.  Apple stopped supporting it a while back, so it wasn't much use as a "real" computer... but it would still be good enough to store some files, if I could get another operating system on it.

Turns out, over the years, there's been enough demand for this retrofit that it should be relatively easy... should being the operative word.  Me, I got carried away with getting clever, so I've wasted most of this day on this project already... still, I did work out one thing that might be of help to some other poor soul out there who's stuck, trying to get the process going, without anything more than 5-year-old posts to start from.

The biggest hurdle I hit was actually just getting the install process started.  In theory, you should be able to reboot your Mac, hold down the Option key (or Alt, if you're on a PC keyboard), and get a list of boot options.  In my case, whether it's the odd PC keyboard I'm using, or the KVM switch it's being fed through, or something else, it simply didn't work.  The way I found around the problem is to install a little boot manager called rEFInd (a fork of the long-abandoned rEFIt tool mentioned so often in those years-old posts).  With that, you can reboot your computer, and, after a few seconds to let the optical drive spin up and recognize the contents, refresh the boot screen to select the install disc to boot from.

Past that... well, I won't go into all the trials and tribulations I went through trying to re-partition the drive to basically use OS X/rEFInd as a glorified, bloated boot loader.  However, at the end of the day, I did finally say "to heck with it", and let my installer of choice just use the whole disk instead... and it works like a charm, although that first 20-30 second boot process left me wondering if I had run into another dead end.  So, for the record, and for any poor Google searchers out there who might be wondering, OpenBSD 5.6 (i386) installs, boots, and runs just fine on a MacMini2,1 machine, once you can get the install disc to boot.