[geeks] Ubuntu partition on Bootcamp Mac?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Jon Gilbert wrote:

>> You might have better luck running it inside of VMware Fusion.  It's
>> really good stuff.
>
> No, the main reason I want to install Ubuntu is for enhanced OpenGL
> performance. I want to boot into Ubuntu without having it wrapped in a
> virtual machine, which is sure to limit 3D and network performance.

I really doubt that you'll find better OpenGL performance than under OS
X.  I continue to be amazed by the graphics speed of even my older Mac
hardware.  With OpenGL on Linux (unless Xgl is self-hosting now), your
OpenGL visuals still go through X, whereas OS X does it the other way
around (the 2D drawing modes are implemented atop the underlying 3D
acceleration).

The easiest path to booting Linux, though, would seem to be via EFI.
Surely someone's written an EFI bootstrap for Linux by now.  One of my
coworkers mentioned that FreeBSD had one in -CURRENT nearly a year ago.

Failing that, you may want to look at rEFIt, which is a much more
hacker-friendly tool than Bootcamp.

As far as resizing your partitions goes, that's what Boot Camp does.  If
it'll make a third partition, you should be fine.  However, tossing in a
second SATA disk would likely be a faster way to get there.  Your Mac
can boot off any connected device (any internal SATA or IDE device, USB,
Firewire, network), provided that the device has a recognizable
partition map and the right bootblock on one its slices.  In fact, your
Mac will boot non-GPT disks with old BIOS boot blocks (provided your
firmware is recent enough), so plopping a second disk in your system and
installing Linux onto it the regular way would probably be the easiest
way to get where you want to be.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "When they turn the pages of history, when these
Elgin, TX        (   days have passed long ago, will they read of us
USA               )  with sadness for the seeds that we let grow?
-                (               --Neil Peart, "A Farewell to Kings"