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

Why?

[ducomputergeek]

What's the point with VM software these days like VM ware or Parallels? We use intel macs as our primary development platform. Why? Paraellels allows us to have OSX and then boot XP Pro, Vista, Linux, BSD, and OpenSolaris with a double click of the mouse. We've found it much of efficient to use VM's for this kind of stuff than boot camp or triple booting because we can change environments with a mouse click, not a restart. And then if something does go heywire, we can kill the VM from inside OSX usually. Hell I have OS 10.5, XP Pro, and OpenBSD open right now on my MacPro.

Part of the reason of buying the macs was so we could easily test products across various platforms and no bitching from our developers. They want to use Kdevelop for a project, fine, install the Linux flavor of your choice in Parallels and go. Want to use Visual Studio, fine, boot up windows and run visual studio, not a problem. Want to use BBedit or Textmate and go, again, not a problem.

Triple booting maybe cool for an experiment, but these days, VM makes it far easier for most tasks to just double click and go.