Posts Tagged “Installation”

Slightly adventurous Intel-based Mac owners seem to often be afraid or confused about installing Ubuntu along side OSX, but it is actually quite simple. There are some oddities that make it different from installing on a PC (but if it was the same, it wouldn’t be a Mac now would it?). Because of this, I am going to outline my easy install method that will leave you with a dual-boot system with OSX and Ubuntu (Those out there that want a Triple-Boot setup will require a bit more complication and I suggest just checking at ubuntuforums.org).

Intro / Setup

For the purposes of this article, I will be assuming that you have OSX Leopard (10.5) installed on your Mac (with some additional details for those with OSX < 10.5), and you would like to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex along side it. This should cover most users at the time of this writing.

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I decided to do a complete reinstall with Intrepid on my iMac. Everything went quite well, so I decided to share the steps that I took to do the install. Note that in the end, I want to dual-boot OS X and Ubuntu on my iMac with no other partitions. You will need to adjust your install for any custom setup you might want to have.

1. Download the Ubuntu 8.10 x64 Desktop iso and burn to a CD with Toast at the slowest possible speed.
2. Use DiskUtility to resize the OSX partition and make space on the hard drive for Ubuntu. Select your hard drive on the left side, and on the partition tab, click the “+” to add a partition to the disc. You can make this partition any format as it will just be removed later. Right now, we are just allocating space for the install.
3. I already had rEFIt installed, but if you do not have it yet, now is a good time to do it.
4. Make sure that the Ubuntu CD is in the drive and shutdown the iMac. Start it up again, and this time you should see the rEFIt menu on startup instead of the grey and white Apple logo screen. If you still boot directly into OS X, then you might need to perform the manual installation of rEFIt.
5. Once you have rEFIt working, you will be able to select the Ubuntu CD to boot. Eventually, you will get to the Ubuntu desktop.
6. Once there, go to System > Adminstration > Partition Editor. This will start gParted. In this application, you will see a graphical representation of the partitions on your hard drive similar to how DiskUtility does in OSX, except this will show ALL the partitions (even ones that Apple tries to hide) and free space on the disc too.
7. Near the Right end of the bar at the top, the partition that was created with DiskUtility will show. There will likely be a tiny bit of free space before and after this partition as well. At the beginning of the disk, there will be a EFI partition (don’t touch!) and the OS X partition (shows as an HFS+ filesystem). Select the FAT32 partition created in DiskUtility and delete. This will leave a bunch of free space on your hard drive for Ubuntu. When you are ready, click “Apply” and the partition will be deleted.You can now quit gparted.
8. Now,  start the installer with the icon on the desktop. Choose your language and then Timezone. (I chose English and the Central Time Zone [Chicago]). Why in Linux do we always have to choose a city for the time zone? I just want to specify the name of the time zone I am in!!
9. On the next screen select the Macintosh variant of your language’s keyboard. (I chose USA-Macintosh. This variant has always worked for me on my older White Apple Keyboard as well as my newer Aluminum Keyboard).
10. On the next screen, choose to install to the largest continuous free space on the hard drive. This will allow the installer to create a root and swap partition in the free space you left on the drive.
11. Next you will setup your user account and password. (I also chose to enable auto-login as I am the only person that uses this machine.)
12. On the final screen, click the Advanced button and choose to install GRUB to /dev/sda3. This is the Ubuntu root partition. Click OK for that and back at the summary screen, click Install to start the installation.
13. During the install play a little Tali or Tetravex . After the install is complete reboot the machine.

That is it for the basic installation. After the reboot I went to System > Admin > Hardware Drivers and enabled the “Broadcom STA driver” (not the B43 driver) to get the WiFi working. 3D Acceleration and “Extra” desktop effects worked with the default open source driver, but there seems to be an issue when using 3D graphics while desktop effects are enabled (to test this, you can enable the “Extra” desktop effects and then run ‘glxgears’ from the commandline). Turning off the desktop effects will fix the issue. Enabling the Proprietary ATI driver in the same place where you enabled the Broadcom driver will probably help that situation.

After all that, you can install any updated packages with the update manager and reboot. WiFi should now work. Stay tuned for other tweaks that I make to my machine to get things working the way I want.