Intel Mac dual boot: WinXP + linux (NO OSX)
 

Does anyone have an Intel Mac (MacBook, MacBook Pro, etc) withOUT Mac OS X on it? I would love to have either linux (etch) only, or possibly linux + WinXP (for work only, I assure you. =p ).

I've seen a handful of triple-boot operations detailed out there, but what if you just frigging hate OSX and don't care to ever use it, ever? Like me?

I'm looking forward to trying to have a nice X.org 7 + Xgl running on my Mactel / Intellitosh.

You should only need to study the Grub Manual, which you can download from www.gnu.org. Assuming your distro of choice is well behaved, and assuming you install it after xp, it should detect the xp installation and correctly write the grub config (may be found in /boot/grub as menu.lst) for both OSs.

If it doesn't correctly write a config allowing you to boot both OSs, the Grub Manual has good instructions, with examples, on how to manually configure dual boot.

What about EFI? I gather that Boot Camp can take care of booting something that expects a BIOS for a partition with WinXP on it, but would I necessarily have to keep my OSX partition?

I did have my macbook triple booting OSX/XP/Ubuntu then I thought I would give Suse 10.1 a try by just replacing Ubuntu. I made the mistake of letting the Suse install a boot loader which knocked out rEFIt. When I rebooted I got a blank screen with a solid cursor in the top left corner. I thought I was going to have to start from scratch and turned off the macbook and grabbed the OSX install cds. I forgot to take out the Suse disk so I turned the macbook back on and held down the the mouse pad button to eject the cd. As soon as the cd came out Suse came back up and finished installing. I now have Suse 10.1 running on my Macbook and no other OS. It was all by accident really, but I plan to go back to the triple boot configuration. If you really want a notebook with just Suse or any other distro it seems kind of a waste of $ to do it on a Mac when you could get a 64bit notebook and on eBay for about half the price and load it with a 64bit distro.

Conclusion: Yes it can be done, but I don't remember exactly how I did it because it wasn't what I was trying to do. I do remember though that during the install Suse mentioned something about the system being GPT and asking if I wanted to change the flag on my hardrive or something. I don't remember if I answered yes or no but it appears that EFI was no problem for Suse 10.1