A lengthy post follows...
I've been forced to concede defeat - a very kind soul devised a measure to activate the hibernation mode but it has to be triggered manually by the user and there doesn't appear to be any way to tie it into the power management options, which limits its functionality. A few suggestions were made on Linux Mint forum but none of them worked. The fan, which is silent under macOS, runs at full speed on Linux Mint - even when there's no activity and there's a vertical glitch on the left-hand side of the screen. Selecting the recommended Nvidia driver rectifies this but as I mentioned in an earlier post, it then introduces screen-tearing problems. Great!
There's hardly a shortage of distros, so I tried a few others in order to see whether I'd have better luck elsewhere. Debian suffered from screen-tearing and the unofficial non-free version that provides "extra support for some awkward hardware" still failed to fully support the MBA's hardware and couldn't access any updates! Manjaro Linux was also unable to hibernate and repeatedly caused the MBA to completely lock up when playing a MKV file that is trouble free with other operating systems.
Finally, I gave Fedora a go and the same problems were present, plus a few bugs that indicated a failure of basic pre-release testing. I managed to come up with a workaround but it struck me that this was a repeat of my experiences with Linux from over a decade ago in that I was spending more time attempting to fix problems than actually using my computer and getting on with doing things that I enjoy. Fedora, Debian, Linux Mint and Manjaro Linux were all afflicted with the same vertical glitch, which points towards an issue with the Linux kernel and the MBA's Nvidia GPU. It made me ponder: what's the point of struggling with all of this when I don't need to struggle with macOS?
When I finally sort out my 2006 Mac Pro, I'd definitely install Linux Mint on it alongside El Capitan because I wouldn't need hibernation on a desktop computer and so it would presumably work perfectly within that hardware environment but for the meantime, Linux is a no go on my MBA. I erased the partition with a view to replacing Linux Mint with High Sierra but this required a bit of fiddling and creative troubleshooting.
From El Capitan, I downloaded the High Sierra installer but it refused to proceed and informed me that the newly created HFS+ partition could not be used to start up the computer. However it didn't give me the option to convert it to APFS if that is what was required. Google is our friend and it led me
to this solution that will skip converting your drive to APFS. From the Terminal, I typed:
Code:
/Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --converttoapfs NO
This didn't work. Terminal reported the following error message:
HMmmmm what's a firmware partition? I don't recall ever encountering this before. After some dogged Googling for answers, I found
this remedy that was far easier and comprehensible than what I'd come across elsewhere. Ironically, with the help of GParted on the Linux Mint Live USB, I followed the instructions to reformat the EFI partition with FAT32, apply the label of "EFI" and set the boot flags to "boot" and "esp."
Next, I rebooted to El Capitan and ran the command from Terminal again. This time it was successful, High Sierra installed!
The only hitch was that the High Sierra installer neglected to prompt me to choose the destination and it upgraded the El Capitan partition instead. Ah well, it just meant that I had to rename the partition to High Sierra and reinstall El Capitan on the spare partition. Only, I couldn't get El Capitan to reinstall: the 10.11 recovery partition software repeatedly failed to proceed.
Every single time I attempted to get the installation underway, it stalled here:
I resorted to my El Capitan USB installer but it no longer appears to work and hangs indefinitely at the Apple logo with the progress bar at maximum. It then occurred to me that I was ignoring the most obvious solution: boot to Snow Leopard, download the El Capitan installer and run it from there. This did the trick, it asked me for the target partition and carried out the reinstallation.
Initial observations with High Sierra:
We're all aware that the 2010 2GB C2D MBA is to say the least, a modestly specced machine but in the right hands it's still highly capable. Contrary to my expectations, High Sierra runs very well and I didn't notice any decrease in performance compared to that with carrying out the same tasks with El Capitan. All of the programs which ran under El Capitan (and prior to that, Snow Leopard) have retained compatibility under High Sierra.
A major improvement that immediately stood out was drive management. One of my external HDDs has a problematic NTFS partition that isn't detected under Windows and whilst it's accessible with macOS, previous versions were unable to search for filenames using Finder - I had to manually browse through the drive for them instead. With High Sierra this is no longer the case and it's a very welcome development.
Anything else will be shared in the
High Sierra thread but I'm just pleased that despite Linux not working out for me, there was a positive outcome to this episode.
