Triple Booting an Intel Mac the Right Way

Miah Clayton writes "In the past, installing Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows on an Intel mac meant that you were forced into only having 3 usable partition slots due to the MBR/GPT hybrid limitations. Steven Noonan figured out a way to avoid dealing with the MBR partition limit and have a Linux install that isn't performance-crippled by having a swap file instead of a swap partition."

Comments

Here is why.

[Miah Clayton]

I am not an enthusiast of anything. I like my Mac for a few reasons, but the purpose for triple booting is a sole one: I am a developer. I need the ability to cross develop. And I need to do it on the run, since I am very seldom in a fixed position for more than a few hours. Therefore, I need to use a laptop for most development. This is not an ideal situation, ever. Laptops notoriously have smaller HD sizes, more RAM restrictions, slower processors, and, typically, integrated graphics. With these limits, using VMWare Fusion (which I own and still use for certain things) carries an unacceptable overhead. It also occasionally interprets OpenGL and DirectX improperly, which is not an acceptable scenario as a game developer. The ability to genuinely triple boot allows me to remove the RAM and CPU overhead caused by booting as a guess operating system. It has nothing to do with "Macs are awesome" and everything to do with "I can cross develop every major platform on one machine, and one I can be on the move with"