[wplug] dual-booting Linux on Mac Mini

[Jonathan Billings]

On Sun, Aug 05, 2012 at 08:33:34PM -0400, Pat Barron wrote:
> 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...

Dual-booting on x86 PC hardware is pretty well-understood
(well... until UEFI starts showing up everywhere).  Most distros
handle it flawlessly and there's plenty of documentation on the
subject.
(note: I manage hundreds of computing labs with dual-boot win7/RHEL6,
so I might be biased on the subject.)

Dual-booting on Macs are weird.  They have this dual-GPT/MSDOS
partition table, they have some dual-boot setup for windows but I've
consistently had problems getting Fedora to actually install a
bootloader on a Mac the first time.  It was worse with the PPC macs
too.  I agree, that on a mac, it might actually be easier (and
actually better supported by the hardware vendor) to just run MacOSX
and run other OSs in a virtual machine.  



-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>