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Best Partition Table for Triple Booting


John Laxson
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Hi all,

 

My MacBook arrives today, and before I get too involved in it I'd like to setup partitions so as to have room to install Linux and hopefully windows for a true triple-boot system.

 

It's coming with a 120GB hard drive, so I was thinking of doing 100/10/10. My main concern is whether Linux will need a swap and potentially boot partition. Any suggestions?

 

Thanks,

John

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Linux already boots - but it's unclear if it boots from the main drive or from USB. See link:

http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/knoppix/

 

Also, you don't *need* to add a swap partition for Linux. You can install it perfectly fine on one partition without swap. Later you can create a file in the Linux filesystem and use this for swap (command is addswap I believe?). However, you will get slightly better performance if you have a dedicated swap partition.

 

Jim

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The real question is: how much space will Vista take up?

 

I'm probably only going to be dual booting linux and MacOS X. I guess the first thing I'll do when I get my MacBook is do a re-install, setting aside enough room for swap and root.

 

Thankfully, you don't have to set aside a whole lot, since linux can read/write HFS+ partitions. This let's me keep my documents and media over on the osx partition.

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Thankfully, you don't have to set aside a whole lot, since linux can read/write HFS+ partitions. This let's me keep my documents and media over on the osx partition.

Since I've never kept Linux around for more than a week, I never bothered with permissions. However, I can tell you that Linux respects Mac permissions and won't let you just use them. Inversely, I would assume Mac can't use Linux files without permission-setting. Course, I suppose it could all be done as root...

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... chmod? :)

 

HFS+ uses unix file system permissions so if you set your linux user's UID to be the same as your OS X account's UID, you should be all set. Both OS X 10.4 and Linux can also use ACL's, so if you really wanna go nuts you can.

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