So I’m a total ‘nix newb and it’s high time I resolved that. And the only way I can think of to do so is to put it on my everyday use machine in a way that I can make myself use it everyday as my main OS. So I’ve done my research and I’m going to dual boot my MBP with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (64-bit desktop version) with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. I’m going to set up a shared partition which will hold all of my data (Music, Pictures, Movies, Code, etc) which will be accessible (read/write) from both OS’s, and I will give Ubuntu an honest try and only boot into OSX when absolutely necessary. I figured this adventure would be a good time to start the ol’ blog back up (rather, start it anew since I lost all my old posts :P ) and document my journey for posterity and all that.
So to start, some information about what I’ve got currently. I’m using a Macbook Pro 5,1 (found by running
sysctl hw.model
from a Terminal in OSX) 2.8GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM with a 320GB HDD, with about 200GB of it currently used. First step, of course, is to back that up so I can get back to what I’ve got if I muff this whole thing up. After that I’ll burn a cd with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit Desktop and boot into Ubuntu from the Live CD to verify there’s no glaring hardware/driver issues and that this whole thing might be worth doing.
Next I’ll need to take inventory of what all that data is so I can figure out how much space to give each of my partitions. So browsing through my disk I find the following:
- /Applications – 4.5GB
- /Developer – 7.9GB
- /Library – 9.2GB
- /System – 4.8GB
- /Users/rarana – 177.2GB
- ~/Documents – 23.2GB
- ~/Library – 23.4GB
- ~/Library/MobileSync – 2.3GB
- ~/Library/Caches – 709MB
- ~/Library/iTunes – 702MB
- ~/Library/Steam – 17.9GB
- ~/Movies – 5GB
- ~/Music – 110.5GB
- ~/Pictures – 11GB
The OSX partition will need to have enough room for /Applications, /Developer, /Library, and /System. The Applications folder should shrink a bit in size as when I do the fresh install I’ll be trimming some fat. Probably by about the amount that the ~/Library folder will add to it (Steam will probably not be added, at least not with all of the games I have installed there currently, which drops the size of that folder by 17GB). So, around 26GB for that partition to hold what it currently holds. With a 320GB HDD, I’d like to be able to give it plenty of padding so I’ll call that one at about 45GB.
The System Requirements for Ubuntu 10.04 say it should take about 15GB, again I’d like to give myself some padding so I’ll give it 25GB. Ubuntu also needs a swap partition, which, since I have 4GB of RAM, 5GB should be more than sufficient.
The shared partition will need to contain ~/Documents, ~/Movies, ~/Music, and ~/Pictures, as well as about 4GB of code and data that I have spread across several folders that I didn’t want to list out. So that’s about 153GB that will need to go to the shared partition at least. With 75GB taken by the two OS’s I’m left with 245GB so that should cover it :)
With my data all backed up and partitioning all planned out, I’m off to go make it happen. Check out the next post to see my notes on actually implementing these plans.
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