So with partition plans in hand from the previous post I reboot using my Snow Leopard DVD and using this post as a guideline I repartition the HDD into 4 partitions then resize them accordingly. The first partition is formatted as OSX Extended with Journaling enabled with a size of 50GB, which is to house the OSX install. The second partition is set OSX Extended with Journaling disabled and a size of 240GB, which is to house all of the shared data. The third and fourth partitions need to be 25GB and 5GB respectively but both will be set up by the Ubuntu install so for now they get formatted as msdos/fat partitions. Then I continue with the install stripping out any optional fluff I can find (Printer Drivers and extra languages namely) and let the install go. Thought I’d note here that after the install was done and all the latest updates applied the Snow Leopard install took up about 12GB, but I plan on installing XCode later which will take up a good sized chunk. I also wanted to use rEFIt rather than having to hold down the alt key anytime I reboot to get to my Ubuntu install (given that I’d like to use it as the default), so I ran the Installer Package for that before rebooting to do the Ubuntu install.
After that it’s time to reboot using the Live CD and this time choose “Install Ubuntu 10.04″. Again, using this article as a guideline I go through the install of Ubuntu. Nothin’ fancy during the install process except for the partitioning, which I chose to do manually. The only things that need to be modified are the last two partitions. The 25GB one should be set as Ext4 for its type and should be flagged to be formatted and mounted at “/”. The 5GB one should be set to “Use as: Swap”. Other than that it’s defaults all the way down.
DiskUtil after both installs have been completed
After that install finishes, I’m able to boot into either OS just fine and I get a nice little GUI splash screen to pick which one I want to boot to each time I reboot. I like that, but I want the auto boot timeout to be a bit quicker, so I boot into OSX and
sudo vim /efi/refit.conf
and change the first line there to
timeout 3
I also want Linux to be the default OS so I go to the bottom of the file and change the default_selection to
default_selection L
Now I want to set up the shared partition so that both OSX and Ubuntu can have symlinks set up to point to the same data, residing on the shared partition. Here’s my basic process for this.
- Mount the drive in Ubuntu (see here for help with that)
- Create the User folder and all of the subfolders that will need to be shared (Documents, Music, Pictures, etc) on the Shared drive.
- Delete the corresponding folders in ~ (making sure to move anything from them to their shared equivalent first)
- Create the symlinks in ~ to replace them:
ln -s /mnt/shared/rarana/Documents ~
After this I had some problems with permissions due to the OSX user and the Ubuntu user having different UID’s. This article took care of that for me. Basically I had to go force Ubuntu to assign my user the UID and GID that the default OSX user uses (501:20).
The last thing I want to take care of while still in Ubuntu is GRUB. It sucks that when I pick Linux in rEFIt, it then sends me to the MBR Partition which I then get a GRUB prompt and have to choose Linux a second time. Since I know that everytime I choose this partition I’m going to be booting into Ubuntu, I want GRUB to shut up and leave me alone. To make that happen:
sudo vim /etc/default/grub
and make sure these 3 lines read like this:
GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
noting that the hidden timeout line has been uncommented. Then
sudo vim /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober
and comment out the if statement:
if [ "x${found_other_os}" = "x" ] ; then
and its corresponding fi (hint: its the outermost if statement in the adjust_timeout() function).
After saving that file run
sudo update-grub
to generate a new Grub Config file.
After that the only thing left to do for now is boot into OSX and replace the User’s folders with symlinks to the Shared Partition (which should already be mounted automatically).
Next time I’ll talk about some minor tweaks to getting things running the way I’m used to and probably porting over all my backed up data.
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