Boot an Intel Mac with Linux
p2p news / p2pnet: We’ve all had it up to here with reports on the fact MacIntels can be booted with both Apple and Microsoft operating systems.
But now there’s news of something completely different —— OnMac is touting Boot Camp with Linux ; )
It’s been used to set up a Macbook, "but is untested on the imac/mini," says the site. "Therefore if you try this you do so at your own risk."
It also notes ominously, " this procedure can potentally [sic] Destroy all data on you machine’s hard disk drive, so make a backup first".
If that hasn’t put you off, it can only be because you’re interested for educational purposes. Right? heh.
Anyway, you’ll need one or two items, namely: an Intel Mac, of course; OSX install DVD(s); a non-upgrade windows XP cd with SP2 slipstreamed; an x86 linux live CD/DVD (perhaps the gentoo 2006.0 live CD); the Intel Mac firmware update (early 2006 models only); Apple Boot Camp; and, the OSX 10.4.6 combo update.
"The primary problem with installing operating systems on a mac is the partitioning system," says OnMac, continuing:
"Intel macs use the new GPT method to partition drives. This is supported by OSX (obviously) and linux. However windows can only be installed on a machine with a legacy (MBR) based partitioning system. In order to overcome this, bootcamp uses both systems, and herein lies the difficulty in triple booting. Currently there is no partitioning software available apart from diskutil (included with OSX 10.4.6) that can create dual gpt/mbr partition system drives. Current GPT based partitioners (eg parted) wipe the MBR partion, whereas current MBR partitioners (fdisk/partion magic) can’t edit GPT.
"In other words we have to manually partition the drive using diskutil in order to get the necessary partition structure for triple booting. However it gets worse. MBR only supports 4 primary partitions and GPT does not support extended partitions. Combining these two limitations means that a dual partition system disk can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions. In addition, apple reserves the first primary partition for their bootloader. That leaves us with only three partitions to play with, one for each OS. Hence, we cannot have a linux swap partition, instead we must create a swapfile. Also, for some reason bootcamp expects the windows "c:" drive to be the last partition present the drive. If it isn’t windows setup will crash with a "cannot find hall.dll" error after the first reboot.
"Finally, it is best to stick with the advice given by Apple and format the windows partition as FAT32. If you use NTFS there is a possibility the GPT/MBR partition tables will no longer agree. However if you do decide to stick with FAT32 your windows partition cannot be greater than 32GB."
Still interested? Then head on over to OnMac for chapter and verse.
Also See:
OnMac – Triple Boot via BootCamp, April 15, 2006
April 15th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
April 16th, 2006 at 1:37 am
I guess I don’t understand why you would need an expee disk to install linux. That’s like neediing a chevy engine to install a supercharger on your dodge.
April 16th, 2006 at 2:15 am
I suspect that it’s due to the EFI system that the intel macs use in place of the older BIOS, that all other pc’s use. Essentially that cd somehow provides xp with a way of booting up using the EFI rather than a bios.
Once distro makers can get their hands on EFI based systems they’ll be able to figure out how to provide native support for them and you wouldn’t need the boot cd anymore.
Vista was meant to support EFI natively by the way, but for some reason that was dropped. Way to NOT develop an OS billy the pie and stevie the chair!
April 16th, 2006 at 6:02 am
Linux supports booting off EFI natively anyhow…
Gotta remember that they had Linux going on Macintel’s long before Windows.
[ ] Boot from EFI support
x This enables the the kernel to boot on EFI platforms using x
x system configuration information passed to it from the firmware. x
x This also enables the kernel to use any EFI runtime services that are x
x available (such as the EFI variable services). x
x x
x This option is only useful on systems that have EFI firmware x
x and will result in a kernel image that is ~8k larger. In addition, x
x you must use the latest ELILO loader available at x
x <http://elilo.sourceforge.net> in order to take advantage of x
x kernel initialization using EFI information (neither GRUB nor LILO know x
x anything about EFI). However, even with this option, the resultant x
x kernel should continue to boot on existing non-EFI platforms.
April 16th, 2006 at 9:40 am
mac = 0 brain required, linux = brain required – problem!
April 16th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Vista will support EFI. Get your facts straight.
April 16th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Only in Vista 64 bit… get YOUR facts straight.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:55 pm
A Macbook handles a live cd ok