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Ash HN: I just bought a Macbook Pro, want to multiboot, now what?

10 points by blogimus ↗ HN
Background:

I've owned laptops for the past 13 years, starting with a Toshiba satellite pro and latest with a Lenovo Thinkpad X61. I've played around with various flavors of windows from '95, NT 4 to 2000, XP and server 2003. Also played around with linux flavors, focusing on Slackware, Redhat then fedora core and now Debian.

I just bought a Macbook pro (base 15" model). For my work I need to develop platform specific software for all 3 major platforms (Linux, OS X, Windows XP (thankfully our IT staff has deferred Vista. )), in addition to server software which will run on Linux for production.

So I'm reading through the Apple bootcamp docs and looking over my web searches for tutorials and info on triple booting Leopard, Debian and Windows XP. Do any of you work with this kind of configuration and what suggestions do you have?

I'm assuming that I'm going to just scrub my factory install and create four partitions (one for each OS, and one win32 for share)

The thing I'm concerned with the most is dealing with weirdness in maintaining the configuratino. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

19 comments

[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] thread
jballanc
Any reason not to virtualize? With the most recent MBP, you should be able to run all three OSes simultaneously without too much degradation in performance. Pro tip: Combine full screen virtualization with spaces for best experience. ;-)
blogimus
Can you elaborate? I've run VPC on Mac (I bought PVC with office 2004 for my G5), but this leave a LOT to be desired. I'd rather avoid the virtualization. the only success I've had with virtualization is with Xen. Other virtualization attempts (VMWare and MS VPC) has failed for performance and driver reasons. This could very well be different on the X86 architecture, hence why I'm asking for advice.
hbien
It's a lot faster on x86. Give it a shot.
axod
Also try sun virtualbox (free) - best VM I've tried.
colbyolson
In my opinion and personal experience, I would recommend using Parallels rather than VMWare for running VMs. There is also VirtualBox if you prefer using something open-source.

Here is a link to an exhaustive benchmarking test for Parallels vs VMWare. Good luck.

http://bit.ly/4DZtVg

jballanc
Despite its name, VirtualPC on the PPC chip was actually an emulator, not virtualization. I've tried and had success with all of the following on Intel Macs:

QEMU - http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/

VirtualBox - http://www.virtualbox.org/

Parallels - http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

VMWare Fusion - https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

Windows support ranges from good (QEMU, VirtualBox) to great (VMWare Fusion, Parallels). My personal pick is VMWare because of its excellent support for non-Windows OSes. I've managed to get Ubuntu, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, Haiku, and Plan9 working with it. Under Windows, I've been able to use a USB MobileConnect dongle and VPN, and if you happen to be running OS X Server you can even virtualize other OS X Server instances (Edit: I should mention that Parallels also has support for this).

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mellis
I have Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux running on my unibody 13" MacBook. There are a couple of things to watch out for. You can only have three partitions, because the GPT / MBR synching only supports four and one is used as an EFI partition. Windows has to be the last partition or it won't boot. The Bootcamp software will only create split your partition into two (three, with the EFI partition) - just use disk utility or the diskutil command line tool to do the partitioning. Make a backup first.
blogimus
Thanks. I was considering 4 partitions. One for each OS and a small FAT partition to share among all (damn licensing on NTFS and windows incompatibility with EXT anything.
codeodor
When I set Windows up on mine, I could not see the Mac partition from it, nor read/write without extra paid software. The software works so smoothly I could not recall its name since I've never had to interact with it. (Having looked it up now, it's called MacDrive).

I don't know how Windows-Linux, and Mac-Linux partition connections are visible between each other without similar pieces of software.

I do know that Mac was able to see Windows just fine for reading, but writing anything was impossible.

nudded
what i'do is the following: run bootcamp assistant and create an extra partition. (make it big enough for the 2 OS's).

then run the linux installer, split up the free partition, in any way you like). Install linux on it. Then run de windows installer using the leftover partition.

i also suggest to install rEfit so that you can fix your guid partition table to be able to select each OS at startup.

Zev
Holding down the option key at boot will let you select what OS to boot, no need to mess withs omething thats hacky like rEFIt...
axod
I tried the same, but it was actually a pain.

I use virtualbox now, no need to reboot.

kamidev
Personally, I am very happy with VMWare Fusion on my Macbook Pro. I can comfortably run OS X and other platforms running simultaneously, in my case: Ubuntu, Debian and Windows XP.

4 GB of RAM isn't strictly necessary but makes things more comfortable. I fully agree with jballanc about Spaces and full screen mode - that is really nice!

Consider also that VMWare has good support for virtual networking. For instance, you can have your Debian server running in one virtual machine serving desktop clients running in their own virtual machines. Testing client/server stuff that way has saved me lots of time.

CyberFonic
I second the vote for VmWare ! I use it extensively with 4G RAM. You should have no problems running three environments concurrently if not more. I prefer NFS rather than CIFS due to better retention of permissions, etc. I use Python and wxPython in my line of work and it's almost freaky watching the same program run from NFS share on the three environments. Just need to watch some Win32 compatability issues, most are well documented.
bjplink
Third vote for Fusion. I'm on 4 gigs of RAM as well and I run XP alongside my other programs all day without problems.