“Will my old Macbook 2008 Unibody still go strong today?”
Straight forward answer: Yes, it will!
I decided to get out my old Macbook and install a dual-boot Linux distro on it (MX Linux 23) because I wanted a better screen for my Goattracker machine… Well, that might not be everybody’s use case, but for me that sounded wild. So I dug out a USB stick, put MX Linux 23.4 64 bit version on it (via my Eee PC on Linux, as I struggled hard to get the ISO written to the stick…) and booted the old Macbook from it.
This machine already featured an 256 GB SSD from some old adventures, so there was plenty of space available to resize the MacOS partition and create three new: (Late learning) An EFI partition to allow for bootmanager integration and a SWAP- and the root partition.
MX Linux installer did its job without issues and I could take care of activating the new partition in the boot process. This was the only task in the whole process that required some tough prompt actions. See this MX Forums Post for details. This will replace the Macbook EFI with ReEFInd, that will allow integration of multiple bootable partitions. Then I was able to dual-boot the Macbook to either MacOS 10.11 or to MX Linux.
Following some customization of the desktop (new background, different conky script), I installed the Goattracker and Sidplay. Goattracker ran without any issues (YES!!! Goal achieved!), Sidplay threw an error, stating Audio hardware would not be available. Before messing with any settings, I tried SidplayFP from the MX repositories – and it worked.
Some tests with network were initially not really successful – loading webpages or YouTube videos took literally ages. I could quickly related this to the Wifi settings; I am having on my access point both 2,4 and 5 GHz bands activated and the Macbook Wifi driver did the same. Restricting it to only one band (by right-clicking the Wifi-widget and configuring the settings for my Wifi) solved the issue and both downloads as well as webpage loads are running smoothly and very responsive.
To summarize it: Wow, this machine is really still usable after 16 years! And I am looking forward to using it for my Commodore C64 adventures.
Of course, this article was written on my 2008 Unibody.