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by orangecat 18 days ago
I wanted to see how Fable could do at getting Linux running natively on my M4 Mac mini. Turns out pretty well: it patched the Asahi installer and m1n1 bootloader to support M4, and created a workflow where it could build, push, and debug kernels with no interaction on my part after the initial setup. It's now happily running headless with ssh access, and hopefully will have video soon after a USB DisplayLink adapter arrives. (No HDMI/Thunderbolt yet).

I don't know for a fact that earlier models wouldn't be able to do that, but I figure if they could we would have heard about it by now.
2 comments
franze 18 days ago
My Fable today shipped a stable and app store compatible linux as an mac app.

Opus 4.8 started that project but even with rounds and rounds of feedback and gpt 5.5 quality assurance subagents it stayed buggy / unstable as hell.

the version now seems pretty stable. an ai within that app is humming along quite fine for hours without any crashes.

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ajeskey 16 days ago
Is the networking a USB gadget, or were you able to get around the PCIe + DART crux?
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orangecat 15 days ago
USB2 only, which still makes for a surprisingly useful system with DisplayLink and wifi adapters. Supporting the rest of the hardware looks like it will require watching macOS under the hypervisor, which Opus doesn't think it can do and Fable isn't allowed to think about.
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ajeskey 15 days ago
“USB2 only” still doesn’t narrow what I was asking about. Do you mean the existing m1n1 DWC3 device-mode/CDC-ACM proxy, or Linux actually running xHCI in host mode and enumerating a USB Wi-Fi dongle?

Asking/Curious because I have been working on something for a few months, building an OS that is tuned for inference on Mac hardware. The amount of tooling I have had to create to get things like native networking, working; let's just say it would be a heck of an ego hit if Fabel "just got it working" ha!

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