Debian on a Mac Mini

First try...

It should be surprisingly easy according to this page...

1. debian-8.6.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso Go here and download the first dvd iso of the latest release.
2. I am installing on this Macmini 3,1.
3. The internal DVD "Superdrive" would not accept the freshly burned DVD so i attached my external USB DVD and that worked... Apple optical drives suck ;-)
4. Non free firmware (b43/ucode11.fw) is needed to make the wireless NIC work according to the install dvd. I opted to not supply this during DVD install.

It worked like a charm... question now isfor what purpose i should use it ;-)

Second try...

I started over and installed without any graphical desktop because i never use that on unix/linux systems.

When trying to set up wlan0 i discovered that iwconfig, wich is part of wireless-tools, were missing after i installed the non-free b43 wireless firmware.

http://wiki.debian.org/iwconfig was a big help too...

Third try

This might help: Mac Mini (late 2012) will not show any wireless networks.

 sudo apt install firmware-b43-installer

Then configure the wireless interface as appropriate.

This is what dmesk looks like when the WLAN interface driver works:

fmj@minibian:~$ sudo dmesg |grep b43
[    3.933890] b43-phy0: Broadcom 4331 WLAN found (core revision 29)
[    3.934307] b43-phy0: Found PHY: Analog 9, Type 7 (HT), Revision 1
[    3.934316] b43-phy0: Found Radio: Manuf 0x17F, ID 0x2059, Revision 0, Version 1
[    3.934317] b43-phy0 warning: 5 GHz band is unsupported on this PHY
[    3.936382] b43 bcma0:1: firmware: direct-loading firmware b43/ucode29_mimo.fw
[    3.936601] b43 bcma0:1: firmware: direct-loading firmware b43/ht0initvals29.fw
[    3.936831] b43 bcma0:1: firmware: direct-loading firmware b43/ht0bsinitvals29.fw
[    3.977886] b43 bcma0:1 wlp2s0b1: renamed from wlan0
fmj@minibian:~$