Being a mac system admin and support specialist and CentOS guy. I can say you can always try using an external hard drive to boot the Mac off of and install CentOS on that drive to play around and test out all the drivers for video card, wireless, etc... I don't boot into CentOS but have it running in Parallels and it runs great. I also do recommend to get your Mac repaired too, just be sure to clone your hard drive off to an external drive before sending it into the shop. Apple is known to completely erase hard drives with no warning. -Jeff On Nov 15, 2010, at 8:44 AM, Les Mikesell wrote: > On 11/15/2010 10:18 AM, James B. Byrne wrote: >> After a long, and quite disheartening, series of hardware problems >> with my HP laptop I decided to try out a Mac (late 2009 Intel based >> 19.5 inch). In the months since January past I have discovered this >> to be no significant improvement and I have grown tired of the >> persistent wireless connectivity problems and am totally put off by >> the upgrade to OSX-10.6.4 which killed HD graphics using Open-Gl. >> Since July, trying to use HD on my Mac now blackens half the screen >> and then locks the system. >> >> I am contemplating wiping the system and installing CentOS-5.5 >> instead. Before my frustration leads me to run straight on into a >> wall, what can I expect to NOT work on the Macbook if I do this? I >> do need wireless, albeit I really cannot say that I have it now. I >> also dearly would like to get back HD graphics as well. > > Can't help directly with the hardware questions, but (a) if you are > still within your Applecare coverage, take the thing in and get anything > that doesn't work fixed before touching the OS, and (b) you might try > Virtualbox with Centos as a guest (or VMware if you don't mind paying > for it). I've generally found the vendor-supplied native video, sleep, > and wireless tools work best on laptops and virtual machines work well > enough for the client-type things I do under Centos. > > -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos