[wplug] Dual boot w/OS X

[Justin Smith]

Does anyone have experience dual booting Linux and OS X? I've been trying 
to set up OpenSUSE on a couple of ~2009-2010 Mac Minis by using the 
rEFInd[1] boot manager, but I'm having a devil of a time getting it to work. I 
guess I just don't understand how you're supposed to partition Linux after 
you install rEFInd from OS X using the supplied install.sh script. 

If I remember correctly, the OpenSUSE installer recommends a fairly 
standard setup of non-LVM EXT4 partitions. I went with that, but it wouldn't 
boot; the bootloader said it couldn't find the hard disk and hung. I also 
noticed that rEFInd mistook my OpenSUSE root partition for FAT even 
though it was EXT4 (and I had installed all filesystem drivers, including 
ext4, via install.sh --alldrivers). 

As an alternative, you can have the OpenSUSE installer recommend an LVM 
setup. That's what I tried next. Well, this configuration overwrote rEFInd 
with GRUB2-EFI, which is /not/ what I wanted. OS X was listed in the GRUB 
boot menu, but it threw a kernel panic when I tried to select it.

I /was/ able to get dual-booting to work correctly by re-installing rEFInd 
from Linux, but I don't understand /why/ that worked. I'd like to be able to 
set up dual booting without clobbering rEFInd and then re-installing it.

-- 
*Justin Smith*
GNU/Linux System Administrator

/"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."/

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[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/