Installing Linux on Boot Camp partition

[sweetandy]

I'm using the low-end Intel Mac Mini. After making the five gigabyte partition for Boot Camp, I found out that I have an SP1 version of XP. So it was a no-go.

I formatted the partition to act as a separate Mac OS X volume called "Andrew", which was kind of my "stuff" folder on the desktop. Unfortunately this made things slow and became quickly annoying when it had to literally copy from one volume to another every time I wanted to put a file in this new folder.

So I went back to my old setup of just having the "Andrew" folder on my basic Macintosh HD volume. However...

Now I'm curious if there is a way in Disk Utility to unformat the partition to free disk space so that Linux can see it for installation when I'm starting up on the install CD. At this time, it doesn't seem as if I have the option for unmarking it as a Mac OS X volume.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

--Andrew

[nixgeek]

If you're still interested in putting Windows on that Mac Mini, check the following sit on how to slipstream Windows XP Service Pack 2 using your SP1 disc.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...slipstream.asp

[macbri]

... and if you want to pursue the Linux route, I installed Fedora Core 6 on a MacBook Pro. Everything you need is explained on the Dual Booting page at Mactel-Linux.org. I used the "BootCamp + rEfit + LILO" described in th final section to let me use the ATI accelerated drivers. It also shows how to use Parted to edit the partition table the way you want, and you could use someting simple like "mkfs" in rescue mode to create the fiesystems you need. That should do what you want without the need for Disk Utility.

There's a link to a modified Ubunutu distro for Intel macs in that section, although I used a vanilla FC6 install CD without problems.

I even slapped together a rEfit icon for FC6

os_linux.png