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Skip Navigation LinksPC Authority > Features > Tutorial: Triple-boot Win XP, Linux and OS X on an Intel Mac
Tutorial: Triple-boot Win XP, Linux and OS X on an Intel Mac
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FEATURE

Tutorial: Triple-boot Win XP, Linux and OS X on an Intel Mac

by Leigh Dyer  on Jun 8, 2006
Tags: intel | macintosh | boot | camp | os | linux
1 comment in this discussion
"That's not really a tutorial..."
By Nerdy117
 
You can create a third partition to install Linux on to, but you must ensure that you don't alter the partition table at all during the Linux install. No Linux partition tools handle MBR/GPT hybrid partition tables, but many Linux installers will re-write the table even if you don't change anything. There are also issues with video handling in the emulated BIOS, with only certain VGA and VESA modes working.

After a failed attempt using Ubuntu, which left me needing to rebuild the entire system, I grabbed a Gentoo live CD (www.gentoo.org) and used it to install Gentoo 2006.0. I don't normally use Gentoo, but Linux is Linux, and Gentoo ran nicely. Its manual installation leaves low-level details like formatting partitions and installing the boot loader up to the user -- perfect for this install.

To re-create my setup on your MacBook Pro, or another Intel Mac, follow these steps:

1) Install the Mac OS X 10.4.6 update, and the firmware update for your system.

2) Partition the drive using Apple's 'diskutil' command under Mac OS X. This assumes that your drive has a single partition dedicated to OS X, which is resized to fit some extra partitions -- one for Linux and one for XP.

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 60G Linux linux 5G "MS-DOS FAT32" winxp 8G

3) Insert your XP CD, reboot, and hold down option and alt to make it boot the device selector. Boot from the CD, and run through the installer. At the partitioning screen, select the drive labeled 'C:'. On each reboot during the installation, make sure you hold down the option/alt key again and boot from the Windows drive.

4) Boot from the Gentoo live CD, and once it has logged in to X, open a terminal. Format the Linux partition you created earlier, which will be "/dev/sda3":

sudo mke2fs -j /dev/sda3

5) Configure networking using the sky2 Ethernet driver and install the Gentoo base system, following the guide on the Gentoo website. When installing a boot loader, make sure you install LILO, configured to write its boot sector to the start of your Linux partition, rather than to the start of the drive.

6) Even with the boot loader on the partition, Apple's boot drive selector won't allow you to boot from it. The easiest workaround is to chain-load the Linux boot sector from NTLDR, the XP boot loader. Mount the Windows drive and copy the boot sector in to a file on it:

sudo mkdir /mnt/windows
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /mnt/windows
sudo dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/windows/linux.mbr bs=512 count=1

Now, edit the boot.ini file on the Windows drive and add this line:

C:\linux.mbr="Gentoo Linux"

7) Reboot the system, and hold down option and alt on boot, selecting the Windows drive. When the XP boot menu appears, select the "Gentoo Linux" option, and then hit Enter at the LILO prompt. Gentoo should boot and drop you at a console login prompt.

I hadn't used Gentoo for a few years until this experiment, and I'm glad to see that it's still coming along well. It's relatively unique among Linux distributions, though similar to the BSDs, in that it builds software on your system as it's installed instead of using binary packages. It automatically pulls in dependent packages and builds them as well, so you can, for instance, build an entire GNOME desktop with a simple 'emerge gnome' command.

Some people use this source-level packaging as a way to apply outlandish compiler optimisations to their entire install to improve performance, though its effects can vary. The real advantage is the level of customisation it offers through its so-called 'USE flags', which let you enable or disable optional features on a system-wide basis. For instance, if you're not a GNOME fan, you can disable optional GNOME GUIs in any built packages. All this compilation takes time, but thankfully, compilers scale very well across multiple CPUs (or CPU cores), so the Core Duo in the MacBook Pro is a perfect CPU for Gentoo.


Parallels Workstation offers a glimpse at a virtualised future
Parallels Workstation offers a glimpse at a virtualised future
Future trends
Most people agree that dual-booting is not an ideal solution -- it would be much better to use virtualisation technologies to run multiple operating systems at the same time. The CPUs in every Intel Mac support Intel's Virtualisation Technology (VT), codenamed Vanderpool, which opens up new levels of performance and compatibility for VMware-style applications. In fact, the first for Mac OS X has appeared: Parallels Workstation, a low-cost application that does run quite nicely. Hopefully we'll soon see some open-source competition from QEMU as well.

If I was a betting man, I'd say that Apple may ship virtualisation technology as part of their next OS update, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

It will still take some time for virtualisation to be the standard way to running multiple desktop OSs though, because little is currently virtualised above the CPU itself. Emulation techniques for storage and networking work well enough, but emulated video simply can't handle the demands of gaming, or 3D accelerated desktops like those Mac OS X, Xgl on Linux, or Vista, and virtualising the video hardware may be as big a task as virtualising the CPU.
This article appeared in the July, 2006 issue of PC Authority.
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