Hi All,

I am a noob, but have managed a couple of distro installs dual-booting with XP. My friend has a Mac, and I am trying to convince him he can dual-boot on it.

Is there anything special/different about installing on a Mac? Can we partition or re-size with GParted? Set up a "swap", "/", and "/home" the same way I did on my PC?

It has been a long time since I have been able to use a Mac.

Thanks for any help.

Make sure you get the right Linux for a Mac. Older (pre-Intel) Macs use PowerPC chips (and really old macs use Motorola 68K chips) so make sure you get the right architecture. Otherwise, yeah, it works a lot like a PC. IUf using an Intel Mac you can dual boot with bootcamp or parallels. If using a PowerPC Mac you'll use a different bootloader (I think the most popular is called yaboot) but it can dual boot between Linux and MacOS. I set it up once with YellowDog on an old iMac and it seemed to work fairly smoothly -- just remember it's similar but not the same and try to read the install notes for the distro you choose.

Thank you.

His is a quite new Mac, so must be an intel-based.

So we can install the same distro as I have installed on my PC? As long as it is not powerpc?

I just installed Linux on my MacBook a few days ago. I would not bother using Bootcamp(I hear that it does not play well with Linux). Instead, Try rEFIt. http://refit.sourceforge.net/ it works great. Also, if you are looking for a good distro for a Mac, Mepis actually has a Mac Utility in their latest release, as well as support for the Mactel boards. One thing to mention, I noticed that unless you are willing to reinstall OSX, you only have one shot at resizing the OSX partition. When you install rEFIt, be shure to update the MBR in its "Partition" tool. And lastly, I made this mistake, install GRUB to the ROOT partition. Otherwise, it will not boot.

Thanks for the reply.

Still have not worked up the courage to try my friends Mac. Seems to be quite a bit more involved compared to what I thought was an easy set-up for dual-booting on a windows PC.

It is kind of a pain, but not as bad as I had expexted. My only issue is trying to optain a "right click" I can't seem to find a how-to on this I was Googleing around for almost 3 hours last night... If I can find a link I will post it here. If someone else know of one then that would be even better.


What problems are you having?

Hey mhg, I found these links when trying to figure out the whole "right click" thing, anyway, I hope that these may be usefull to you. I know that I had recomended Mepis earlier, but thought that if you wanted to stick with Ubuntu you could use this:
Ubuntu
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook
(This has an installition how-to as well as hardware configuration ie:mouse, isight camera, etc.)

And if you decide that you want to try something else:
Gentoo
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_MacBook

Hey thanks for the links!

I will read through them this weekend.