Shahid Hussain

Dual Booting Ubuntu 8.10 with Tiger on a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro

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Shahid Hussain
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This weekend was taken up by one huge discovery: it is possible to use Gparted on Ubuntu Ibex to resize an HFS+ partition non-destructively. This one fact made it incredibly easy to dual boot my MacBook Pro with Linux. Here’s how:

  • Backup everything you might want to keep from your Mac just in case. Resizing partitions is always risky!
  • Install rEFIt on the Mac.
  • Make enough space on the Mac for your new partition.
  • Create an Ubuntu Ibex installer & live CD.(You can just download the .iso and burn it with Disk Utility.)
  • Boot into the live CD by holding down the “c” key when you reboot. Don’t install right now, but head into GParted.
  • Just resize the HFS+ partition that contains your Mac. Keep your fingers crossed that it works OK. (It did for me).
  • Run the Installer, and go to Manual mode when you get to the partitioner. From here you can do what you want – I created a 20gb partition for root and 4gb for swap partition.
  • Finish the installer and reboot. Here’s a fun bonus – rEFIt will automatically detect the new partition, and just create a spot in the boot menu for you.

And that’s it!

Comments

3 responses to “Dual Booting Ubuntu 8.10 with Tiger on a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro”

  1. dan

    I’m intrigued. Why is this different/better than bootcamp? Why are you dual-booting rather than “Parallel”-ing? (other than cost 😉 ) What’s wrong with OSX?

    FWIW, I’m still running an always-on Ubuntu machine, which I then freenx into. I found out recently that copy&paste works across windows (i.e. copy something in OSX, paste it into something in Ubuntu). Although I might’ve been drunk at the time so I probably ought to verify it.

    Anyway, I’m still trying my damned hardest to treat my macbook as something that I “use” and not something that I “fiddle with”.

    Also, I note that having sold us this rEFIt, your very next post is how to fix it…

  2. Shahid

    Well, my good man, it’s simple – I have Tiger, which doesn’t come with Boot Camp. I can’t say whether this works better or worse than Boot Camp, but it does *work*.

    Not using VMWare Fusion because I wanted to activate some of the cooler Compiz effects, which need to get right at the hardware.

    OS X, while lovely, loses out to Linux in some areas (which I imagine you’ve discovered, seeing as you have one.)

  3. dan

    Tiger, Leopard, Bagpuss, whatever…

    I agree that no OS is perfect, but I really don’t get on with dual-booting. For me, it’s got to be one-os-per-machine (it’s like one-laptop-per-child, but not quite so media-friendly).

    Not that it’ll matter once everything’s running in Chrome.

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