Triple boot OSX Leopard, Ubuntu 8.04 and Widows Vista

I received a Mac Mini today. We plan to use it as part of our lab setup here at work. The box is pretty small and compact. It's quite cheap too.

It will primarily be running some flavor of Linux, but I plan to install Windows Vista ("Business" version) and OSX Leopard on it as well. This way I can quickly test all three OSes if needed. So how do we set up triple boot on this box? It turns out to be quite easy.

1. Installing OSX Leopard

First, install OSX. Use the whole disk. After installation is complete, do a "software update" if needed.

2. Installing Windows Vista

Next, we need to split our OSX partition in two. One for OSX, which will be resized, and another for Windows. The program "Boot Camp" does all that for us. Start it from:

"Finder" → "Applications" → "Utilities" → "Boot Camp Assistant"

Boot Camp presents us with a nice slider to resize the OSX and Windows partition. I allocate 25GB to Windows Vista:

After the resize is complete, you'll be asked to insert the Vista DVD and choose "start installation". OSX reboots and boots from the Vista DVD. The last partition is for Vista, so we format it (using NTFS).

After a couple of reboots later, Vista is installed

At startup, Vista boots as default. To change this press and hold the "Alt" key startup boot. Boot into OSX.

3. Re-partition and install rEFIt

In OSX, start "Disk utility" from "Utilities". Under "Partitions", choose the OSX partition and click the "+" button. This splits our OSX partition in two. The new partition will be our Linux partition. Don't worry about the name or format (HPFS), we'll re-create it using ext3 later.

Next, we need to download a boot-manager that manages both EFI (which Mac uses) and (old) MBR (required by Windows). Head over and download rEFIt. After you've installed rEFIt, open a "Terminal" and type (yes, still in OSX):

$ cd /efi/refit
$ ./enable.sh
+ sudo bless --folder /efi/refit --file /efi/refit/refit.efi --labelfile /efi/refit/refit.vollabel

Great! Now we have a nice graphical boot manager.

4. Installing Ubuntu 8.10

Download Ubuntu 8.04 (i386) from here and burn it to a CD. (Actually, since 8.04 isn't released yet, I'm using the alpha5-release fetched from here). Boot the installation CD from the rEFIt menu.

When installing Ubuntu, there are two important steps:

1. When choosing partition be sure to manually partition the disk. Then delete the third (sda3) partition. Re-create it using ext3 and set the mount point to "/". Do NOT create a swap partition. We'll create swap later.
2. Grub: Be sure to install grub on sda3 and NOT sda (hd0). You can change this by choosing "Advanced" under the last installation step.

At the next reboot, we're presented with a nice boot screen:

We're not quite done yet. Since Mac uses GPT, which don't allow logical partitions, and MBR, which Windows require, - we're stuck with four (primary) partitions. That's the reason why we can't have dedicated swap partition. So we create a swap file (in Ubuntu):

  $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=2097152
  2097152+0 records in
  2097152+0 records out
  2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 80.0314 s, 26.8 MB/s
  $ ls -lh /swapfile
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G 2008-03-05 18:34 /swapfile
  $ sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
  $ sudo mkswap /swapfile
  Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 2147479 kB
  no label, UUID=819c205d-b3de-4ed0-ae4c-17e8b7e81443
  $ sudo swapon /swapfile
  $ free -m
               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:          1996        569       1426          0         12        196
  -/+ buffers/cache:        360       1635
  Swap:         2047          0       2047
  $ cat /etc/fstab
  ...
  /swapfile       swap    swap    defaults        0       0

That's it. Our partition layout now has the first (sda1) partition occupied by EFI, next (sda2) is OSX, third (sda3) Linux and the last (sda4) Vista. A graphical layout (using gparted) listed below: