Dual-boot Lion and Ubuntu 12.04 on MBR disk with Chimera installed

[trancephorm]

Installing OS X Lion on my Thinkpad T520i was a real adventure lasting about 2 weeks, but I managed to make it boot from MBR partitioned disk, using ######'s [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] option which installed Chimera boot loader. So everything works OK in the boot process, and now I want to install Ubuntu 12.04 so I can have both systems dual-booting from HD.

 

I see there's rEFIt program, but I suppose it works only with GPT partitions, and mine is MBR partitioned. More, I was reading people have problems with it (especially after updating Ubuntu), maybe rEFIind fork is the solution, but still I'm asking for help, don't wanna go through restoring my OS X installation afterwards...

 

I already have a free space reserved for Ubuntu installation, is there any tested and proven method I can install Ubuntu 12.04 in my environment, so I can boot both systems from same hard disk...

 

Thanks!

 

I just noticed ###### in my previous message turned to ######? Why is that? Is it banned or something?? ) Please don't mind if I look stupid, I'm completely new in Mac world...

[rockinron_1]

Install ubuntu as normal but when you get to the partition stage you should see an option of where to install your bootloader. Install it to the same partition as you install ubuntu to.

This way chameleon stays as the primary bootloader and when you press a key on boot it will automatically detect and show linux as an option as well as OS X.

[trancephorm]

Tried it... but it failed - there's no option where to install bootloader in 12.04 installation. After reset, OS X shows in Grub bootmenu on two places (Mac OS X 32-bit and 64-bit), but when I try to run either, there's little bit of waiting and machine just reboots...

[rockinron_1]

This menu has been on the ubuntu installs for a while not sure about 12.04 but you were looking for the line at the bottom of here:

http://cdn1.sudobits.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/partition-free-space.png

If you've installed the ubuntu bootloader over chameleon then your gonna need to reinstall chameleon then find out how to install the 12.04 bootloader to your ubuntu partition

[cryptic unix]

You can simply chainload Chimera using Grub2, that's what I did.

If you're going to do this Grub2 (form Ubuntu) will be your primary bootloader, but you have to add another entry to Grub2. In the file

/etc/grub.d/40_custom

you have to add something similar to this:

menuentry "My OS" {

set root=(hdx,y) #replace x,y with what you need

chainloader +1

}

 

Becareful the numbering scheme of partitions has changed in Grub2 (sda1 is now hd0,1).

Now you have to execute:

update-grub

 

Now grub should show you an additional entry for booting OS X.

[rockinron_1]

Further to my post above I have since installed ubuntu 12.04 on my system and I can confirm the menu I mentioned is present and their is no need to chainload the os x bootloader.

 

All that is required is that the ubuntu bootloader is installed to the same partition as ubuntu instead of the MBR, then chameleon / chimera will automatically detect linux on boot and allow selecting it as on option.

 

The only modification that may be required is to alter the time-out on the ubuntu bootloader to 0 so you don't have to wat for it to time out after selecting it when booting.