Triple Boot on MacBooks Working

MikeTheMan writes "By now, everyone probably heard that Apple's recently-released Boot Camp software allows users to install Windows XP alongside OS X. But now, people at OnMac.net have discovered how to triple-boot OS X, Windows XP, and Linux. There are instructions on the Wiki for getting Gentoo running, but it is probably trivial to get other distros working as well."

... but does it run OS/2?

(or whatever other OS might be fashinable, *BSD, ...)

Why boot linux here?

I'm a linux noob, but i'm not clear why you'd WANT to boot Linux in this case, other than maybe if you are a multi-OS admin.

Re:Why boot linux here?

Finder kinda of sucks

Two words: Path Finder [cocoatech.com].

Developers/ISVs?

It sounds ideal for cross-platform application development --- you only need one machine, and just need to reboot when porting/compiling to your 'non-primary' platforms. Combine with a decent cross-platform API like wxWidgets for best results. Make it a MacBook and you're portable too, and with all three platforms available to give product demos depending on who you're selling to.

What a waste of money

I'm not going to buy a macbook until it can run all the major OSes and emulate Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2 and PS3. And it had to have a cell phone built in, as well as an iPod.

And it has to have an awesome case mod too. Because products are never good the way they are released, we always have to mess with them!

Re:What a waste of money

You mean like this [microsoft.com]?

FAT32?

Great... Apple wants you to run the XP partition as FAT32 instead of NTFS... can we possibly make it more insecure?
Caveat emptor: I haven't bought my Mac yet so I can say that I haven't tried this... yet.

Re:FAT32?

Unless you are creating file shares on the machine itself going with NTFS is moot. Assuming the user gets physical access to the machine and yanks the drive, it doesn't matter if you are running Fat32 or NTFS. NTFS permissions are trivial, unless you are using EFS encryption in XP, but then you could always use PGP or Truecrypt or any other 3rd party encryption.

Re:FAT32?

I created an NTFS partition no problem. Mac OS X even mounted it for me to read from (I didn't try writing though...)

You really should research what you say before spewing lies.

Re:FAT32?

Apple doesn't "want you to" use fat32. They helpfully suggest using it, as mac os x cannot natively write to an ntfs partition, but it can write to fat32. It's a simple practical consideration, not some conspiracy.

Boot windows

While you guys with macs are looking to boot into windows, I'm looking to boot windows OFF of my laptop.

Sometimes I think I should be in comedy. Funny, yes i know.

Sweet, but what about dual boot?

This is cool, I like it, but I want to dual boot on the Mac Mini; and by dual boot I mean like I have it now on my old iBook -- OS X and Linux. I don't want Windows on it. So, my question, when you boot holding down the 'option' key on the Mac can you make it so you'll have the option of OS X or Linux instead of having to rely on the NT bootloader to choose Linux? I'm sure after that you could hack out the Windows icon so you just have the X and Tux on the select screen.

So, can it be done? Would it require hacking Boot Camp? Did Apple make this easy to modify? Also, I saw that the Linux ATI drivers work; do they support the graphics card in the Minis? I'm waiting for my local shop to get the Mini Duo Core's in, then I'll likely jump in, but I want to dual boot from there, like I do now.

Re:Sweet, but what about dual boot?

Do NOT mess with the partitions. Seriously.

Use diskutil's resizeVolume command to create (up to 4) the partitions you need. You cannot have more than 3 "real" partitions on your system (OS X uses #1 for the EFI stuff).

BootCamp works by having an MBR and a GPT partition table simultaneously. There are no partition tools out there that correctly edit both at the same time. Doing it by hand via's OS X's GPT/FDISK tools often fails, as well. I have no idea why.

I'm one of the people who started messing with this triple boot first. Trust me; you don't want to mess with parted or fdisk (in Linux/FreeBSD/whatever). If you do decide to, go to mactel-linux.org, and get the parted patch, and then make sure you use the GPT tool in OS X to create a set of matching MBR/GUID partition tables.

But I promise you; you'll have to wipe your disk if you start messing with these partition tables. Nobody knows the correct way to handle them, yet. More experimentation is needed, and there's a good chance that at any given point in the process you'll corrupt your disk.

I, for one...

I, for one, welcome our new triple-booting overlords.

Re:I, for one...

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

OS X... why Linux

Why would one bother using Linux if OS X offers all the features (well ok, most) of Linux, and the only feature Windows has -- some games (WoW anyone?). I've finally made the switch to Ubuntu on my work PC, but would be just as productive in the OS X environment w/o the need to ditch Aqua. Besides, XOrg can easily be installed in OS X...

WoW Mod:Speed up World of Warcraft Load Times! [filenuts.com]

Perfect opportunity for NetBSD.

This is a perfect opportunity for the NetBSD crowd. They're experts at creating an OS that runs very well on very specific machinery. With some effort and direction, they could produce the premiere alternative UNIX for these Mac systems.

We haven't seen a comparably standardized system since the SGI Indy, and that was over a decade ago. This time around the system is far more affordable, too. It'll lower the participation barrier for your average Joe and Jill Developer.

MacIntel - CHRP?

From my perspective, the Macintel computer is the fulfilment of the CHRP dream from the mid-1990s. For those too young to remember, CHRP (pronounced Chirp) was an idea from Apple that stood for Common Hardware Reference Platform. Such a computer would exist outside of Operating Systems - it could and would run anything. It never really got off the ground, for obvious reasons.

I always thought CHRP was a great idea, and it seems to me that the MacIntel platform running bootcamp IS the reincarnation of CHRP. I think that if Apple can run the price of their hardware down enough and incorporate things like card readers etc. into the front panel, they could really increase market share in a big way. For example:

Here's an interesting idea, that could save a company vast sums of cash:

Buy apple hardware, and triple boot the suckers, and wave bye bye to the vast collection of test boxen that clutter the labs.

Granted: specific software that is dependent on specific hardware that doesn't fly with the mac platform won't be testable, but some huge vast percentage of what is out there doesn't operate that way, and this would especially be true of internet based applications.

So, instead of using a old Intel box that's been re-grooved to do Linux (initial cost, say, $1000) and ANOTHER Intel/AMD box for Windows (say, another $1000) and an Apple computer to test the Apple build (say, $1500), you now just buy the MacIntel box, ($1500) and install Windows and Linux and you're done.

This multiboot thing will be especially impressive as Microsoft continues along this idiotic path of multiple flavours of Windows. God ferbid they just make one REALLY GOOD version that does the job properly (a la OSX).

But this Bootcamp thing could save some companies millions of dollars. They could upgrade their labs to Apple computers, run bootcamp, and say bye bye to HP/Dell/Gateway/etc. forever, fulfilling the beautiful vision of CHRP.

Works for me.

RS

Re:MacIntel - CHRP?

Such a computer would exist outside of Operating Systems - it could and would run anything.

You must have got something wrong. CHRP simply was a specification for an open standard PowerPC hardware platform, just as the IBM PC is an open standard for x86-based hardware.

Wow I didn't see this coming...

Installing multiple OSes onto a Mac? This'll be child's play soon, and it's even more trivial to install tons of operating systems onto a generic PC. I can already install Mac OSx86 (sublega), Windows, a couple flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, etc. etc. etc. on a generic computer. Mac's funny GPT is just a little obstacle.

This might be a silly question, but...

...why might one need to triple-boot three OS's?

I'm not trying to flame or anything, but it seems like you can get pretty much anything you want out of simply dual-booting OSX and Windows without throwing Linux or BSD into the batch.

Re:This might be a silly question, but...

Oh, and cross-platform developpers will naturally be happy. One machine, 3 systems.

"Get it Working"

For life to get easier, we get OUR tools RIGHT for the job and "Get it Working", meaning efficiently.

Lots of different work is out there for different people.

For me, Boot Camp simply means efficient work with one fewer laptops being paid for, maintained & carried around, while still being able to run at virtually native hardware speed...no more, no less.

End of Subject.

EFI

While booting Linux using this method is good, it's still just a hack. A cleaner solution would be booting Linux using EFI on Intel Macs (and probably PCs using EFI in the future). We'll just have to wait until elilo's x86 port is finished.

very nice

This is an excellent step. Now if only someone can get the overcomplication down a little, maybe so that Linux boots directly from EFI and I don't have to choose "windos" first each time I actually want to boot Linux - that's just torture, isn't it?

Bad day for Linux gamers

This sucks. Now all of those Linux game developers will never port their games over to OS X. Instead, they'll just say, "Even though there is such high demand, we don't need to port Tux Racer to OS X. Just install Linux on your Mac." Son of a whore!

partitionless Linux?

I remember a few years ago where just about every Linux distro supported booting from a drive file. Sadly that feature seems MIA these days. I was thinking that such a feature may be useful with Boot Camp to allow each Linux "partition" to exist in its own file on either the FAT/NTFS or HFS+/UFS partition.

I've been hoping to see a Linux distro that supported booting from a drive image file for PPC. It would help in convincing some people to try out Linux on their Macs, some of which still run Mac OS 9.

Apple: "What have we done!!"

Everybody is talking how having Windows on Mac will make Wintel users "switch".

However what I see in the last month is so far the opposite: Mac users trying to cram Vista, XP, 98, Linux, BSD on their machines.

If this trend is to show what the future holds, Apple might in the end be sorry about what they've done to their business.

MacIntel without OSX?

I'd be interested to know if it is possible to buy a MacIntel without OSX preinstalled.

OSX doesn't fulfill my needs as a primary OS, but the CoreDuo Mac Mini has appeal as a low temperature SFF Linux box. If Apple do reach even half the market share they once had, I wonder if we'll be seeing an increase in demand for the hardware they distribute without the OS tax? Given that Asustek and Quanta make all of the Apple hardware, my next best bet is that Asus simply put out a blank SFF box with the same spec as the Mini.

Can someone help?

I just need something clarified...

I thought the whole point of this stuff..why it was so exciting, was the crazy new virtualization stuff, allowing you to run windows along side mac, perhaps in a window in osx, at native speed.

Read up a bit on it and it seems its just windows booting on intel hardware because of some EFI update that ticked off the 'emu bios' option.

There is none of the fancy virtualization going on?

Solaris boots as well

Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris [sun.com] as well.

IT Pros != IT Depts

your IT department...the majority of IT pros

Like I'd believe anything from an article which equated "IT Pros" with an "IT department." IT pros create things. IT departments install and support things...typically with laughably miserable results.

IT pros try to come up with new ways of using technology to improve business efficiency and open new markets. IT departments specialize in explaining why "no you're not allowed to do that [because it would make our job an eensie bit more difficult and we might actually have to think.]" (Chip on my shoulder? You bet!)

No, the folks you find in IT departments typically aren't "Mac people", if by "Mac people" you mean people who are interested in trying something different simply for the sake of finding out whether an alterative approach might actually be better once in awhile. On the other hand, "IT pros" recognize that a heterogenous environment is a *richer* environment, because every platform has unique strengths and contributes meaningfully to the enterprise.

Re:Now if only...

As of right now their nothing more than a glorified Dell with their own proprietary OS. Thats like saying a porsche is nothing more than a glorified VW bug with a better engine.

Re:USA Today: Boot Camp will start exodus to Windo

Ah, USA Today, that bastion of journalistic excellence.

Re:Now if only...

I would finally switch to apple if they came out with a mac tablet.

Re:USA Today: Boot Camp will start exodus to Windo

From the article: "Further, your IT department now has to support two operating systems, which -- given that the majority of IT pros aren't Mac people -- means hiring or training. But let's say you're blessed with a staff that already knows both. You're still faced with two OSs, two sets of problems, and double the headache. Oh, joy..."

Just so we are clear, my IT departmnent supports whatever the fuck I say it supports. Apple releasing some new software doesn't mean I "now have to" support it.

Not that this is a big deal... I have provided at least limited support for things like logging into our Windows Terminal Server for Linux, Irix, Mac OS X, Windows. We also have Novell servers. Seriously, are there "IT Pros" who really only know and deal with a single platform? They probably make more money than me, too. :(

Re:Now if only...

I feel exactly the same way, except that I don't already own a Tablet PC, so right now I'm researching which one is likely to work best with Mac OS.

Could you tell me a little about your Tecra? What are the CPU, northbridge, graphics chip, wireless, etc.? Is the digitizer a Wacom, or something else? How does it interface with the system (serial or USB)?