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."

Comments

... but does it run OS/2?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

What a waste of money

[Quick Sick Nick]

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!

Boot windows

[backslashdot]

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.

Re:I, for one...

[Agret]

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

Perfect opportunity for NetBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:FAT32?

[MustardMan]

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.

MacIntel - CHRP?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

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

[teslar]

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

Re:Sweet, but what about dual boot?

[WhiteWolf666]

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.