I reformatted my Macbook (2+ years old now) and am bringing back my triple boot configuration, this time with a more intelligent disk partitioning: 50 GB for Ubuntu (9.10), 10 GB for Windows XP (Pro SP2), and the remaining 20 GB for OS X (10.4).
The initial installation of OS X took about an hour to finish, using two DVDs. It used up 16 GB; definitely not a minimal installation. I junked some of the applications like Garageband and iDVD and it freed up about 8 GB, more than enough to allow Software Update to do the job. Two rounds of updates was enough to bring OS X up to date. At this point, though, there are more and more apps that demand at least OS X 10.5, which makes me wonder how much I’ll be playing in OS X from now on.
Next I installed rEFIt. I got the dmg and ran the mpkg, then I popped open a terminal, drilled down to /efi/refit and ran ./enable.sh. Upon restart, the rEFIt menu comes up as usual.
The OS X Disk Utility never makes a working FAT32 partition. As usual, I have to use the XP tool to format before installing, otherwise I get a disk error when booting into XP. After booting into XP, I installed the Macbook drivers generated from Boot Camp that gets the keyboard/touchpad/wireless/etc all squared away, and it did it without crashing, which is always nice. Also remembered to disable the ACPI driver as it can lead to CPU running haywire for no apparent reason.
Installing Ubuntu came last. It installed GRUB (version 2 at this point) in the default location on the MBR, so when I went back into the rEFIt menu, it still showed OS X and XP as the only choices but choosing XP takes you into the GRUB menu. The good thing is that the installer discovers XP and automagically added it to the boot menu. The daisy-chained EFI and GRUB menus are less than ideal, but it doesn’t seem possible to get Linux visible on the EFI boot menu. The way to do it is to install GRUB on the Linux partition rather than on the MBR and doing so makes Tux show up in rEFIt, but I couldn’t get Linux to boot from there. It *might* work with the old GRUB, but I guess it’s more trouble to go against what’s upstream. A little annoying, but everything else works great out of the box.
In conclusion, it’s a great feeling to be able to get a laptop to triple boot in a day’s time, and I’m satisfied with the breathing room of a clean HD and the confidence that I can get anything done on it. Definitely owe a lot to the development that’s happened over the last two years especially on the Linux side. The weeks spent on getting things working on the Macbook with Gentoo was definitely an amazing experience but ever since the X update midway through last semester, the feel was not the same. I learned a lot from the time I spent keeping that system in one piece for so long, and those skills will come in handy this year. Nothing like starting with a clean slate!
Feral Chicken 