John Laxson Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enb14 Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 Good luck with your triple boot, nobody had any other operating system apart from OSX on iMacs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Laxson Posted February 21, 2006 Author Share Posted February 21, 2006 It won't happen tonight, but a month down the road when the geniuses have done their work and made it usable, I want to be able to set everything up without having to repartition, reformat, and start over. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrJägermeister Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 You don't really need a special partition for /boot but you need one for swap (double of the RAM) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimaz Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
furyg3 Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eggman Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 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... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
furyg3 Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 ... 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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