Over the past few months, I’ve been transitioning off a virtual private server provisioned off a friend’s collocated server. The old server has been steadily growing in years and my friend took the chance to begin deprecating the server.
In light of that, I made the jump to one of our other VPS servers. This was about three months ago.
Unrelated to that, I dug out my customized Mac mini 3,1 from storage and began to see if I could get it running again. I went ahead and installed Catalina on the server. That was a bit of a struggle because Apple decided to switch filesystems from the one they’ve been using, HFS+, to the new APFS. Since High Sierra, that’s been the default. At any rate, there’s nothing preventing that hardware from using a different filesystem; just the software running on the BIOS.
To make a long story short, I used the macOS Catalina Patcher to install Catalina on that old Mac mini 3,1. If you want to play around with it, you can follow the instructions below.
![](https://wp.raygoe.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/desktop__on4gxlz1xv6u_xlarge-1024x640.jpg)
The easy way to run macOS Catalina on your Unsupported Mac
Afterwards, I decided that I didn’t really need macOS on such old hardware.
Fast forward to yesterday, I took that Mac mini 3,1 and installed Ubuntu on it. I went ahead and transitioned everything onto that server. Hopefully that’s the end of the server shuffle for a while!