How I triple boot Mac, Windows, Linux
Leigh Dyer installs all three OSes on his Mac, and surprisingly he's lived to tell the tale. Here's how to enter multi-OS nirvana.
By now, I'm sure you've heard of Boot Camp, the Apple software that allows modern Macs based on Intel CPUs to run Windows just like a typical PC, but what you may not know is that Boot Camp works just as well with Linux. In fact, with some fiddling, you can install Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux all on one Mac.
The core of Boot Camp is the PC compatibility layer, which makes the Mac look enough like a PC to get Windows running. Macs use a lot of PC parts these days, but there are still major differences -- Macs use EFI instead of the age-old PC BIOS, for instance. Since there's nothing Windows-specific about this layer, it works just as well with Linux.
The other main part of Boot Camp is driver support, and this is where Linux hackers have had to step up themselves, but the results are impressive. I was able to install Ubuntu Hardy on my MacBook Pro with little hassle, with support for all of the included hardware, including suspend to RAM. There's even support for the multi-touch features of Apple's trackpad, and while it's not enabled out-of-the-box, a few changes to your "xorg.conf" file will see you scrolling web pages with two fingers, and tapping with two or three fingers to right or middle-button click.
If you want to try a triple-boot setup, the easiest option now is to use Wubi to install Linux in to a file on your Windows drive, but you can also perform a traditional partition-based installation. rEFIt is very handy if you do -- it's a graphical boot loader that displays icons for each installed OS, and which can also synchronise the Mac and PC partition tables on your drive, which can be required if you edit your partitions from Linux or Windows.
If that's not enough, then you can even run Linux on old PowerPC-based Macs. A number of distributions support older Mac hardware, including Debian, and it can be just the thing to breathe new life in to older Macs that can't handle the latest versions of Mac OS X.
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