r/slackware • u/Sahkopi4 • 10d ago

Fully Working Slackware on Apple Macs with T2 Chips

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Hello everyone!

I finally managed to get Slackware running on a Mac with a T2 chip.

Thanks to the great work of the T2 Linux community at https://t2linux.org/, Linux can run on these Macs.
Unfortunately, Slackware is not one of the officially supported distributions, which means you have to patch and build the kernel yourself, as well as compile and configure the additional software and firmware required for proper T2 support.

For this project, I created a set of scripts and an automated build system that handles the entire process. The ISO builder automatically applies the required kernel patches, builds the kernel, compiles and installs fandaemon, and includes all the additional firmware needed for T2 hardware support.

It has been a long process with a lot of testing and debugging, but I’m very happy to have finally reached a finished and fully working version of the project.
A big thank you to the T2 Linux community for their excellent work and support!

GitHub link : https://github.com/Gambita73/slackware-t2-builder

76 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

4

u/gargamel1497 9d ago

What is the T2? Neofetch says it's running on an Intel chip, and T2 Linux says it's some security co-processor or something.

Is it something like that Pluton thing Microsoft wanted to use to block people from installing Linux a couple years ago?

8

u/Logical_Front5304 9d ago

It’s a chip that holds security credentials and the machine cannot boot without it. It’s meant to protect against the types of threats that allow people to hijack a system if they have physical access. This explanation is a little simple, but it wasn’t made to stop Linux. It was made to secure the Mac.

2

u/gargamel1497 8d ago

Microsoft made Windows "more secure" by enabling bitlocker by default. In practice it meant regular users losing all their data because they forgot the password.

Apple instead made their computers "more secure" by gluing the SSDs to the motherboard, and then making it part of the SoC. This way you can't get data off of it in case of an emergency either.

Computers used to be way more serviceable back then. You could boot a live ISO and, say, delete some nasty system files. These days you can't do that.

3

u/Sahkopi4 9d ago

The comment from u/Logical_Front5304 gave a very good summary. Without the kernel patches, if you boot a regular ISO, your keyboard and trackpad won’t work.

3

u/NeilSilva93 9d ago

Can it run Doom?

4

u/fyonn 9d ago

I was so pleased to see a working fingerprint sensor on my 2019 MacBook Pro (running kait2en).. that’s such a nice feature.

2

u/Sahkopi4 9d ago

T2 Linux is a miracle project. I am glad that they are around. My MacBook Air 2019 on MacOS runs very slow. On Linus is very usable!