Dual booting Linux: Two simple questions.

T

Travis86

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I recently bought a 200 GB drive on which to put a minimal install of Linux (namely, Gentoo).

I want to be able to do two things:
1. I want to be able to go between OS X and Linux easily. How do you boot Linux from OS X, and how do you boot OS X from Linux? I suppose on the OS X side, the ideal solution would be to have Linux show up as a Startup Disk. I'm not sure about the Linux side, though.
I've read some stuff about yaBoot, but none of it said anything about how to restart into OS X.

2. Since I'm probably going to have about, oh, 195 GB left over, I was wanting to also make this space available to both OS X and Linux. I assume that I will make several Linux partitons for about 20 GB maximum, and then make a big partition for everything else.
To do this, I need to create two partitons (180 GB and 20 GB) with Disk Utility, then delete the 20 GB one when I'm installing Linux, right?

Thanks
 
For Question #1, any OS selections will be done during the boot process. Yaboot installs itself in OpenFirmware, so what will happen is that when you boot your Mac, you will be dumped into OF, with the option of either booting into Mac OS or Linux. It's all text-based, but don't let that scare you. :) A hit of the Tab key will tell yaboot to reveal what options you have for booting.

One other thing to remember. If you are using yaboot, you have to create a small boot partition that will hold the kernel and various other bootup files. Something like 50 MB would be more than enough. As for what filesystem it needs, I believe yaboot still requires the /boot partition to be standard HFS (not HFS+). I could be wrong on this account, but I believe this is still the case. In any event, check here for more info.

This brings me to Question #2: Partitioning...

Personally, I have set up my desktop machines with one swap partition (usually double the size of my installed RAM, unless I have at least 512 MB or greater, in which case I just put the exact amount), and then one / (or "root") partition. In this case with the 20 GB of space, I would do the following:

- /boot = 50 MB, HFS (or HFS+ if supported by yaboot)
- swap partition = either twice your RAM or the same amount (depending on how much RAM you have)
- / partition = whatever is remaining of the 20 GB, any Linux filesystem you prefer

The remaining space you plan on using for storage between Mac OS and Linux should use a filesystem supported by both. Any PPC Linux distribution will support HFS from the get-go. You might even be able to go HFS+, but I don't know if the hfsplus module is loaded by default.

Keep us informed of your project.
 
i recently set up yellowdog on my PB, there werent any problems encountered, and yaboot seems to work out ok. however, i am going to try to see if there is a way to increase the selection timeout b/c sometimes i'll start up the computer and walk away, and when i come back it has timed out and started in linux (default i suppose, is this changeable?). other than that, works good.
 
No, I haven't considered Mac-on-Linux at all. I guess if you want to run your Linux applications and you Mac applications at the same time it would be what you need, but I don't really care about doing that.

I've been thinking about installing Linux a lot lately, and I'm still trying to get everything figured out. It looks like I have two more "simple questions." Namely:

With everything I read about yaBoot, it looks like Linux will boot OS X instead of the opposite. The way I have OS X set up right now, everything works, and I want to affect OS X as little as possible with my Linux install, which I am not at all sure will work. Is there any way to make OS X boot Linux?

Also, do you think I could install Gentoo from OS X? Supposedly you can install it from an existing Linux distribution. If my Linux hard drive is not the boot drive, then I could do all of the partitioning and everything from OS X - right? The reason I want to do this is so I could still use my computer while Gentoo was compiling everything.

Just don't want to mess anything up. Measure twice, cut once, you know.
 
Mac-on-Linux: keep in mind that some hardware won't work as expected when in this mode. For example I *think* hardware 3D is disabled. Airport won't work in that Mac instance on Linux. Network connection is created by creating a dummy device that links to the actual device in Linux. Basically, only the hardware that Linux sees and can use will be accessible to that Mac-on-Linux instance. Since there are no PPC drivers from ATI/Nvidia, you're not going to get accelerated graphics.


Installing Gentoo from within OSX:
I don't think it's possible because you need to run certain Linux utilities to really finish the installation. If said utilities have OSX couter-parts then you might get away with it.

The reason for this is because Linux uses pre-dominantly ELF format for executables. OSX uses mach-o runtime executable format. If OSX understands ELF and can load and execute ELF binaries then you're fine, but I doubt that's the case. To be able to load ELF and run those binaries is what is considered "Linux emulation" in some operating systems.
 
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