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Triple Booting an Intel Mac the Right Way

Posted by timothy on from the use-three-boots dept.

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."

12 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Performance Crippled? by Foolhardy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was under the impression that modern Linux kernels had negligible performance impact from using a swap file as opposed to a dedicated swap partition.

    Personally, I much prefer using a swap file because it gives me more flexibility in locating, resizing and moving swap.

    1. Re:Performance Crippled? by Sockatume · · Score: 3

      To elaborate on that, the advantage of putting the swap on a seperate disk is that your main HDD can be dealing with real apps and data while the secondary swap disk is working away paging things into and out of RAM, giving a performance boost. Using a swap partition on the same drive as the OS makes absolutely no sense.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    2. Re:Performance Crippled? by Ant+P. · · Score: 5, Funny

      I don't have a separate drive to spare on my laptop for swap space, luckily I found a workaround for that by putting the swap on a ramdisk

  2. GPT partitions by c_g_hills · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since Windows even now only recognizes the Master Boot Record (MBR) format

    This is untrue. 64bit versions of Windows support GPT, as do versions newer than Vista.

    Also, I don't have a problem using a swapfile. I see no performance difference at all.

  3. Re:buy a pc by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ballmer, is that you again? Stop it, or we'll cut off your coffee allowance again and lock you in the special place. I mean it this time...

    --
    It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
  4. What is the point? by CannonballHead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As much as this will sound like a trolling post, it's not... what is the point of buying a Mac and then triple booting OS X, Windows, and Linux? It seems to be that Linux and OS X are redundant, not to mention that most things you can run on OS X can be run on Windows as well... why buy the Apple hardware?

    The only reason I can think of is the image of the Mac, honestly. If there were major redeeming qualities of OS X (especially as compared to Linux?), I could understand that as well, but I am not aware of them (granted, I don't use Macs much, but if you're going to install a Unix based OS, Linux, in addition to a Unix based OS, Mac OS... hm!).

    Or am I missing something - i.e., Apple hardware actually is that much better to warrant a higher price tag? Back when they were using RISC based processors, I would readily believe that there might be a difference... but now that even the CPU architecture is the same (Intel...) ... ?

    1. Re:What is the point? by Alinraz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree with your: "what is the point of buying a Mac and then triple booting OS X, Windows, and Linux?" But for totally different reasons.

      I ask: why would you bother with even a double boot, let alone a triple boot? There is nothing you can't do with a Mac, in OSX alone, that you can do with any other OS.

      First, hardware: Apple hardware is clean, reliable, with features that are difficult to find in combination on other systems. Apple hardware works; and when it doesn't they fix it. You don't have to keep fussing with it like you do if you build a machine from scratch. And its price is comparable to similarly equipped PC equipment (there was a recent post here on /. about that specifically). Yes, you can buy a PC for less... but that misses the point doesn't it?

      As for the OS: OSX is like running Linux in many ways. It is solid, never breaks, it performs well, doesn't have virus and worm issues: basically everything that Windows isn't.

      It is based on BSD, and has gcc and other open source tools. It has ssh, bash, tcsh, and X. You can build and run nearly any open-source application or tool.

      What OSX is missing from Linux: fiddlyness. While running a Linux distribution feels good, at the same time it's a fair amount of work. Need to get a new piece of hardware working: compile a new kernel module, add that, and muck with configuration files in /etc. And if you're unlucky, possibly have to muck with device nodes in /dev or monkey around with udev configurations. And that's just one example. Every time you want to add or change something it's rinse and repeat time. Oh and forget Linux on laptops... it's famous for having spotty laptop hardware support.

      But really the question is "why multi-boot"? With VMWare Fusion on the Mac, I really don't know. Just run Windows applications side-by-side with your Mac ones in OSX. Run an entire Linux development server in a virtual box. When you need to compare configurations, clone the sucker and try out a different one. When your Windows VM starts to get a polluted registry, slows down and starts to eat itself, delete and reinstall it...while compiling the Linux kernel in a Linux VM, while writing a software certification test proposal in OpenOffice running directly in OSX. No lost productivity simply because you have to reinstall Windows.

      The real question here is not "Mac vs Linux vs Windows?", it's "why are you still multi-booting?"

    2. Re:What is the point? by Chrononium · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sadly, since we are dealing with the world of computing, things do change, especially for the Mac in the times since those articles were written. The ARS report was benchmarking an emulated version of Photoshop (that's what "Rosetta" does). Fast forward to today, we already have Photoshop CS3 (Mac Pro's do beat the G5's) and there's also CS4. According to one benchmarking source, Photoshop CS3 did do slightly better with the 8 core Mac Pro versus the 4 core (although I would agree that the difference is so small that it could be within measurement error).

    3. Re:What is the point? by HTH+NE1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      As much as this will sound like a trolling post, it's not... what is the point of buying a Mac and then triple booting OS X, Windows, and Linux?

      We choose to triple-boot a Mac in this decade and hack the other things, not because it is practical, but because it is fun.

      --
      Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
    4. Re:What is the point? by lupis42 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      From gblackwo (1087063):

      There are arguably different pros and cons to all three operating systems

      You say there is no need to multi-boot because OSX does everything perfectly. I submit that OSX does nothing perfectly, but everything well, which makes it useless to me. I have many devices, each for one thing, and OSX doesn't do any of those things better than the alternatives. Why use it?
      Ubuntu Netbook remix is much nicer on the ultra-portable than OSX or Windows, 64 bit Windows is required on the gaming machine, and Linux+XBMC does for the mediaboxen quite well. Macs were never an option there, because the one piece of hardware that has component and TOSLINK out in a small form-factor with no adapters or messy cables, the Apple TV, has no DVD drive and does not allow me to easily put stuff on it (where stuff includes zsnes & and a controller, a DVD drive, and support for all of the stuff I have that's not in a format Apple accepts).

      I wasn't intending to attack OSX here, just to attack the evangelism in the parent suggestion that we should all use X because it does what he needs, and we obviously need the same things. Everyone wants different things from their computers, and there is no single solution that will ever satisfy them all.

  5. Here is why. by Miah+Clayton · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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"

  6. Not Performance Crippled by Taxman415a · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed it's been a long time since that wasn't the case. Since the 2.6 Kernel came out basically. Here's the lkml thread on it. http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/6/29/11 and http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/7/7/326 are the two posts. The latter is more informative, the former is definitive and clearly shows Andrew Morton is the one saying that part too. This is from 2005 folks. Someone notify the submitter. That is of course unless you don't trust Andrew Morton to know what he is talking about. And just because this comes up every once in a while, googling for linux swap file performance finds that post easily.