[wplug] dual-booting Linux on Mac Mini

Pat Barron pat at lectroid.com
Sun Aug 5 20:33:34 EDT 2012


On 8/4/2012 9:23 PM, Michael Loomis wrote:
> Should I have added a flag to the first sector? Is this all in preparation
> to Windows 8?
> Anyway, I then tried to install Fedora 17 with no luck, then I tried
> SnowLinux which died near the end of installation. Finally I got Kubuntu
> installed and it still dual boots into the Mac OS.

I wish I could more directly address your questions, but I'm not very 
well versed with the Macintosh platform.

But my general strategy these days, even on PC hardware, is that I don't 
even attempt to dual-boot, unless the machine is seriously 
memory-constrained.  Otherwise, my normal course of action would be to 
choose on OS as the "native" OS (probably MacOS on Macintosh hardware; 
could be either Windows or Linux on a PC), and run the additional OS as 
a virtual system.

There are just so many ways to fail when setting up dual-boot - and so 
many ways to accidentally mess up and risk losing your existing data - 
that to me, it's just not worth the risk.  If possible, I'd rather just 
throw some additional memory into the machine, and then run a 
virtualization package (like Parallels on the Mac), and both OSes will 
probably end up much happier...

--Pat.


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