I appear to have accidentally done something useful.
J's old 2017 iMac had been sitting in a corner in the study, waiting to be wiped and taken to the recycler.
Too old, too slow.
So, today I decided to wipe it.
Rather than do something straightforward I thought I'd try installing the latest version of Ubuntu out of curiosity - I'd heard good things about the current version of Ubuntu and older intel based imacs, so it seemed worth a go.
Certainly, when I tried installing Ubuntu on an older imac five or so years ago I found it really didn't work that well, so it seemed like a fun idea to try installing Ubuntu.
Obviously, bluetooth mice and keyboards don't work until you've installed the new operating system so you need to use an old wired keyboard and mouse. The other thing I found was that you needed to plug the install USB into the back of the mac and not into a USB socket on the keyboard, otherwise I just used a standard installation USB I'd made a few months ago using Rufus and writing the volume as a dd image.
Well, surprise surprise, it recognised the image and booted cleanly
I chose a minimal install because I wasn't totally convinced it would work that well, but it got to the end of the installation process cleanly and rebooted nicely
and once logged in did the usual welcome thing
as I'd gone for a minimal install, I had to install Libre Office and Kate, not to mention Notable by hand and all seemed to work.
To check the webcam, I installed Cheese
giving you a picture of Yours Truly taking a picture of a picture.
Now so far, apart from being mildly surprised at things just working, I hadn't really found a killer use for the device, but I had been wondering on and off whether to buy a larger monitor or an old all-in-one machine to work with scanned hand written documents - working on a laptop can be a bit trying at times - so I downloaded a copy of a Madeleine Smith's marriage certificate
and that convinced me I might accidentally have made a useful machine out of the old imac.
It's not quite perfect - power management doesn't seem to work quite how you'd expect, with suspend and power off not doing exactly what you'd expect, but I can live with that.
Otherwise I'm pleased with the result and reckon I've saved myself the cost of a decent monitor ...
