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Triple Booting (Mac OSX, Ubuntu 7.04, Windows Vista) on an Intel 24″ iMac (Core 2 Duo)

Boot Camp is all spiffy and whatnot, but for some reason, it only supports two OSes. If you’re like me, you’ve got to go a little bit further and install three. While all of the following is documented online in various places, I didn’t find one consolidated FAQ to explain the entire process. Plus, I wanted to remind myself how to do it incase it ever came up again. So this is the general process to install three OSes on an Intel iMac.

Things you’ll need:

• An Intel iMac (other macs use a different type of boot loader/partition table, which I do not address)
• A fast internet connection (to get the next two items)
• Bootcamp (see below)
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/ (or whatever flavor of Unix you want to run)
• A Windows Vista (XP) full install disk. (Apparently you need a SP2 version of XP.)
• several hours of time (you’re installing two complete OSes, among other things)
• if your iMac has a wireless keyboard and mouse, like mine, you’ll need a USB keyboard and mouse during the Ubuntu install later.

Step-by-step:

Back up -everything-. You never know what might happen. After all, you’re resizing your partition, messing with the boot record, and generally getting very intimate with your machine.

Download Bootcamp (http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/). Install and run. Burn the Mac Drivers disk for Windows. This is really the only reason to get Bootcamp at all. You don’t need it for what follows.

In a terminal, run ‘diskutil’ to repartition your (Mac) drive. Something like the following:
diskutil resizevolume disk0s2 190G “Linux” Ubuntu 10G “MS-DOS FAT32″ Windows 32G
My iMac has a 250 GB drive. Here I chose to resize it to 190GB and create a Linux-type partition of 10GB and a FAT32-type partition of 32GB. Do whatever you want size-wise. The basic idea here is that you’re re-sizing the existing partition (which was the full size of the hard drive) to something less and creating two new partitions, one for Ubuntu (Linux), the other for Windows. The command “diskutil list” is a good place to start and “diskutil resizevolume” will describe the syntax of that option.

This was the step that gave me the most trouble of the whole process. I ran diskutil several times and each time got some message about there not being enough space, though I had some 80GB free on the drive. After seeing something online, I shlepped my Parallels harddrive files (each 10-25GB) off to an external drive. After that and an Empty Trash, diskutil ran without a hitch. I don’t really understand whether macs actually do not get fragmented, but freeing up another 60GB of space (for a total of about 130GB) did the trick.

I choose to go with rEFIt (http://refit.sourceforge.net/) instead of the Bootcamp loader. It looks good, is customizable (can change the icons and timeout, etc.) and handles three OSes well.

Install rEFIt. Very straight-forward, just run the package installed.

Put your Windows Vista (XP) disk in and reboot. Hold down “c” after the boot chime to boot from the CD/DVD drive.

Install Vista as you would normally, except be sure to choose the correct partition. If you followed my diskutil suggestion, it will be the fourth partition. Go by the size of the partitions. It’s the fourth because there were already two partitions on your original computer, the first being some 200 MB and containing the EFI (mac boot loader junk).

Insert the Mac Drivers disk that you created using Bootcamp. Run it and reboot. Now your mac keyboard and whatever else (iSight camera?) should work splendidly with Vista.

Have your way with your new Vista system (install updates, play games, admire Aero effects, whatever). You should be up and running with it now.

Eject the Mac Drivers disk and insert your Ubuntu disk. Reboot and hold down “c” again. You should boot into the Ubuntu Live CD system.

Install Ubuntu.

It’s possible that at some point the rEFIt loader gets hosed. Scary, yes, but nothing was lost for me. Just reboot into OSX (hold down “alt/option” at boot to get the Mac disc selector and choose your OSX disc) and re-install rEFIt. It’s very light-weight and easy to put back.

Reboot, choosing Mac OSX now. There is some little bug whereby Ubuntu won’t boot the first time. From the rEFIt menu, you select the Penguin (Ubuntu), it dims, and then the system hangs. Someone pointed out that this resolves itself after you boot into OSX and/or turn the computer off. I didn’t identify the issue because it indeed disappeared when I did those two things. So goof around in OSX (look, you haven’t hosed your original OSX system!), then reboot.

On this boot, select the Ubuntu drive from the rEFIt menu. (Once the Dim Penguin problem goes away, you will be able to boot into Ubuntu from then on.)

Ubuntu isn’t too bright about some of the iMac hardware, so this part’s a pain. Depending on your priorities, you’ll want to do the following in whatever order. This is where you’ll need that USB keyboard and mouse.

Ubuntu doesn’t install Bluetooth by default so plug in a USB keyboard and mouse (if you’re really dorky, or strapped, you might be able to do this with just a mouse). Initially, your wireless keyboard and mouse aren’t supported, so even though the system is up and running, you’ll be dead in the water. You will need to use the package manager to get “bluez-utils” installed and activated. [--terminal command to enable bluetooth and the edit to the config file to enable it at boot--]

The display will default to VESA 800×600 (which drives me batty). You want to run “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” in a terminal and choose the right driver for your display. On my 24″ iMac, it’s Nvidia, so I chose “nv” (http://support.apple.com/specs/imac/). This is key, as the VESA driver can’t display above 1024×800. Then just choose the display modes that your screen supports (I went back into OSX and wrote them down from the Display preferences, since no one seems to have this documented online). For my 24″ intel imac, they are as follows: 640×480, 800×500, 800×600, 960×600, 1024×640, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1344×840, 1344×1008, 1600×1000x 1600×1200, and 1920×1200

That’s pretty much it! You’re up and running with whichever OS you choose at the rEFIt menu at boot time.

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