Triple Boot Your Intel Mac
When Apple released Boot Camp, they made it easy for anyone to dual-boot their Intel Mac with OS X and Windows. A recent discovery from the people that were able to get Windows booting on an Intel Mac before Apple came along with Boot Camp allows you to triple boot with Linux. Unlike the Boot Camp method of installation, some advanced tinkering around with chainloading Linux’s lilo bootloader from the XP ntldr bootloader is required. It’s definitely clear that Apple’s Intel Macs are an extremely valuable commodity to the computer enthusiast, letting you run every OS under the sun.
Apple reserves the first primary partition for its bootloader. That leaves one for each operating system, but Linux needs two partitions — one for the operating system itself, the other for the swap partition. You can get around this by using a swap file instead. This is a tried and true way of getting around this kind of problem. Unfortunately, swap files tend to run slower than do swap partitions, so if you’re running multiple Linux applications on a Triple Boot Mac, you can expect to see a performance hit.
via Linux-Watch.com
The OnMac wiki has the specifics of getting triple boot running. This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I don’t think I can effectively run 3 operating systems on my 80GB hard drive, but having a platform that can run not only OS X and Windows but allow me to tinker in Linux (I’d opt for Gentoo or Ubuntu distro) from time to time is indispensable.
Technically the Macbook (or intel iMac, intel Mac mini) isn’t that much of a valuable commodity to the enthusiast because you can run all of those OS’es on a regular Intel (or prefferably, AMD) systems.
Sadly I have an older AMD 64 without SSE3 so I cannot run OSX fully on mine, Rosetta doesn’t work properly. But I have WinXP and Suse 10 installed right now running fine.
I do see how the new Intel Macs are valuable however, they are definitely the sexiest of all systems out right now. Too bad they are so expensive.
Another downside to the new Mac’s (and most all Macs for the matter) is they can’t really be overclocked. At least I haven’t heard of anyone OCing the new ones.
Does anyone know how the EFI systems are going to overclock in the future? Personally I hate software overclocking so in the future will we still be able to go into the “BIOS” and crank up the speed?
Well getting OS X to run on a PC is more of a pain.. usually requiring a whole DVD download to update, with drivers a bigger problem too. Also you have to be careful with what motherboard and CPU you get, which is rather limiting.
Overclocking macs doesn’t have a large community. On the older Mac Minis at least, you could overclock by arranging 0 ohm resistors (essentially jumpers) on the bottom of the motherboard.
You know what’s even cooler? The idea of running three OS’s and having the ability to “fast user switch” between the three. I saw this 3 sided cube effect on YouTube earlier today.
The video is supposedly showing an Intel Mac running Parallels and a seperate OS on each desktop. Man I want an Intel Mac.
Well don’t I feel important, if I recall correctly it was I who mentioned this to you the other night?
Should you find the room for a more ‘full’ distro SuSE 10.1 is right around the corner, I’m updated to the beta from 10.0 and it’s hands down the most solid distribution I’ve ever run.
The video looked legit to me Derek, it’s using Parallels and Virtue Desktops- so it’s not really fast user switching in the OSX sense of the term.. But yeah, looks hott (with two t’s)!
Hahah, I found this just in my bookmarks from the other day.. but looking in my aim logs it appears you did mutter something about triple booting. :-P
From a purely practical perspective I expect that you would find the Parallels solution much simpler rather than Boot Camp. Installation of various Linux distributions (including SuSE) is directly supported, although I do not believe that there should be a problem with unsupported distributions, the Virtualisation software presents a “standard” harware setup to the operating system that should be simpler for Linux to support, and you can run multiple distributions at the same time as OS X itself. I’ll note now that I don’t have an Intel Mac (old PowerBook still) and therefore this information is anecdotal, but I understand that the Parallel’s solution is pretty good for performance and relatively stable even when running many Guest operating systems at the same time, plus you can install other flavours of UNIX (e.g. Solaris) and even older versions of Windows, although why anyone would ever want to see Windows 95 again would be a mystery.
While I will likely install a Boot Camp version of Windows in order to play a few Windows games when my PowerBook is replaced later this year, I will make more use of Virtualisation on a day-to-day basis and use it to run Windows and Linux. For most jobs the performance of Virtualisation will be more than sufficient and the convenience of not having to reboot (plus copy/paste data between operating systems) cannot be under estimated.
Could you set up a linux partition using boot camp, then use, say, a knoppix boot CD to partition up that partition?
Hot off the press! 17″ MacbookPro =)
Heh, that’s a great thing to wake up too .. 17″ MBP
With Parallels you run actual copies of multiple operating systems at the *same time* on the same CPU - so, for example, you could boot a Macbook into OS X and then also run Windows XP, and Solaris 10, and Suse Linux each in its own window:
http://twoalpha.blogspot.com/2006/04/run-windows-mac-os-x-solaris-and-linux.html
Parallels still runs virtually so you can’t get the benefits of directly manipulating certain bits of hardware. However, it is rather fast for virtualization.
Regardless you still have to boot OS X first then start up Parallels. It’s not like you can boot directly into Linux.
As a lawyer who is addicted to Macs (yes, I have used them exclusively in my law office for over a year) I was excited by the prospect of Parallels so I could finally run the major law office apps in windows without having too many boxes cluttering my desk, and without carting two laptops to court. I had a very hot experience with Parallels, and had to do a clean install on my 17″ MBP (which solved multiple problems including wrist-searing heat).
Does anybody know if Parallels and/or Windows run on a MBP taxes the processor so much that it messes with the heat? Could my excessive heat (which went away upon the full reinstall of Tiger) be caused by something other than Parallels/Windows XP?
Hello Dan. The MacBook Pros which you could buy today have fixed the problems with the heat compound quantity issue. They handle heat pretty well, and generally are very stable. I bought Parallels while it was still in pre-order/beta status. About a week after I got my MacBook Pro, Parallels became final/release. The final release works with other operating systems besides Windows, and I run FreeBSD and Solaris on my 17″ MacBook Pro in addition to using Boot Camp with Windows XP. The iMac would have less of a heat issue then the portables because it is like a full tower in a sense, and can afford some real estate (Space) in design for additional cooling. So far no problems on my MacBook Pro, but don’t sit there cranking it for more then a few hours, these Intels get extremely hot with the two cores. People laughed at the PowerPC when the G5 units, which are based on the full blown POWER servers needed liquid cooling. It seems that Intel will be doing this also, atleast in the future G5 product line replacements, such as the XServe and Tower. There is little reason to boot Linux off of these directly, unless you are a coder who compiles Linux-centric stuff constantly. Parallels uses the second core of the Duo chip, so there is little performance hit. Windows XP’s initial text-based pre-installation routine loads in about 12 seconds under Parallels if using an ISO instead of conventional optical media, compared to about 2-3 minutes natively on the same machine. Boot Camp with Windows will definitely make you feel smug about making the investment, for the 256MB GDDR3 video card is a sure powerhorse with Windows-only games. There are a few games for Intel Macs already, courtesey of ID Software, Blizzard, Aspyre, and independent developers. NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha 4 was released July 1, 2006, and offers all the functionality of Microsoft Office, iWork, and OpenOffice.org, but with the native feel and functionality. However speaking, I emphisize using Apple’s suite over anything else, due to the immaturity of NeoOffice on the Intel platform, and due to the Rosetta overhead of Microsoft Office, which has yet to have been made Universal, and probably won’t as Microsoft has no incentive right now to continue development on alternate platforms. Maybe after they lose a few more billion from antitrust and setbacks, they will get it ported. I hate Microsoft Office, but the Mac version is a lot better then the Windows version for the most part, however it is slow as a dog under PowerPC emulation.
3 os on one machine dream or nightmare?
Sure its cool to able to do it but wouldn’t it be better to just have one os that can do anything? I think Linux would be the only one with the flexibility to be the primary os. OSX are really just another set of Linux distros, well not really but sort of. My dream would be to have an open source OS that is capable of working with files from any platform. What about Sun maybe they can do it since they got platform indepented technologies.
hello folks! dropping in here cuz I am finally making the jump to put Windows on my macbook :) intend to go the Boot Camp route and being a UN*X geek at heart - looking at how I can squeeze 3 OSes on here and play around with them talking to each other ;-)
read all the comments above and see most of you recommend Parallels and don’t really see much talk about VMWare even though I have seen benchmark comparisions here and there on the net.
for the record, Office on the Mac has finally been ported - however as a previous die-hard Windows user - I am definitely going to shell out to get an Outlook eval running - it just seems worth it in the end!