All done.
I have a stack of 12-14 year old MacPros running Ubuntu. They all have dual 4-core Xeon CPUs and most of them have at least 8GB of RAM.
Two are on my desk at work. About the only thing that fails are the drives, but they are easy to replace. A few of them had the graphics card fail. One of the techs here has a reflow toaster at home. He 'baked' the cards for me and 2 out of 3 came back to life.
The newest and the best is a 2010 5,1 we use as a PACS (Picture Archive and Communication System) server. SSD boot drive on a PCI card and 4 4TB server class drives in the bays in RAID 10. Everything else is the original parts. The thing is a tank.
I use the second one as a sand box.
I keep a third one on the floor next to my desk as a backup. Configured and ready to drop in if our either of our other servers go down.
Yeah, mine came fully loaded with the 30" Cinema display, 4 750GB Barracuda drives, Dual Xeon E5472 (Quad-Core/, 3.00 GHz/12MB/1600 MHz FSB) & 20gigs ECC RAM. Oh, and I got it with all the original cartons.
It has the "cooks itself to death" NVidia GT8800;
I reflowed it booty-fab style and it lasted long enough for me to do the whole rigamarole of installing El Capitan without owning another Mac to use for building the install package, then self-immolated again.
I tried supposedly Mac-optimised builds of: Mint with Cinnamon and Xfce DE, GhostBSD with MATE DE, ElementaryOS, 2 recommended Debian builds, and a couple of other Mac-recommended *NIX variants. Of them, only the Mint/Cinnamon & ElementaryOS would complete the install; the latter with errors that proved fatal next boot.
I have no doubt that Ubuntu would install on the thing, but
I really wanted to try one of the more MacOS-flavored variants; if I wanted to turn it into a Windoze box I'd just install Windoze on it.
I've got it working on the Mint/Cinnamon build with a couple of random aTi GPUs; they work but no PBE. I may reflow that GT8800 one more time and see if I can keep it alive by modding it with a monster cooler; I have a legit install of El Capitan working but it needs the GT8800. There's a lot of room in there to eff around, especially if I leave the last 2 drive bays empty.
Yes, I agree; the thing is a gawddamn tank. With cheese-grater chic.
mnem
*toys for old farts*