Security company Corellium has announced that it has successfully ported Ubuntu to Apple Mac devices containing Apple’s M1 processor.
This is a native port with the Ubuntu operating system running directly on the M1 processor, and does not involve any virtualization or emulation layers.
Installation of Ubuntu onto Apple Silicon Mac devices is a multistep process involving the following stages:
- Download and install the Ubuntu POC root fs tar archive, extract it and copy it onto a USB drive using the dd command:
tar -xjvf ubuntu-20.10-preinstalled-desktop-arm64+raspi.img.bz2 sudo dd if=ubuntu-20.10-preinstalled-desktop-arm64+raspi.img of=<your usb device here> bs=1m
- Connect the USB drive to the Mac system via the USB-C port (Corellium indicates that the USB-A port will not work).
- Boot the Mac into “One True Recovery” (1TR) mode by powering off the system and the holding the power button until the boot option screen appears. Select the terminal option from the resulting menu.
- Within the terminal, run the following command:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://downloads.corellium.info/linuxsetup.sh)"
- Enter your login credentials when prompted to do so. After the kernel has been installed, type “reboot” to restart the system.
- Once the system has restarted, enter user name “pi” and password “raspberry” to sign into the Ubuntu system.
To return to macOS at any future point, start the system in one true recovery mode, open the terminal once again, and run the following command:
bputil -n
