Triple boot

Hello,

I have read about the possibility of a triple boot on a MacBook Pro: Os X, Vista and Linux and I was wondering - will Linux and Vista work as well as on a normal PC ? Are they going to have any restrictions ? Will games work in Vista ? Am I going to have any problem using any of the Linux distros ?

Thank you.

 

wow ive never thought of that.. check on osx86project.org.. they have almost everything relating to quad booting, triple booting, and dual booting with linux, vista, xp, and osx..

 

I triple booted OSX, XP/Vista (I switched back to xp), and Ubuntu Linux, your going to have to follow certain instructions based on the linux distro, because the bootloaders for windows and linux dont play well with each other, so your going to have to split them up (you may think your doing it but you may not). What can happen is that when you try to load windows, the linux bootloader can take over the whole booting proccess and you would have to select which OS to boot, and because the mac keyboard isnt loaded like 85% of the time, you would only select the initially selected OS (most likely Linux).

As for the OS's running, they all run fine as if on a normal machine, but your going to have to make some compromises when it comes to the keyboard short cuts and such. Also, I've noticed that the Macbook's headphone jack output quality SUCKS in linux. And according to which distro you use you gotta manually install certain things (web cam, video out, track pad, buncha xorg.conf stuff).

Also for the macbook pro, not sure if the backlight works correctly or not, and I believe video card issues are still being figured out. Haven't read up on the subject for about 2 months, so they could be fixed. Sorry for the long post, but thats all I can think of off the top of my head.

Hope this helps!

 

Yes, it helps a lot, thank you.

One clarification, though: what's with the keyboard ? when and why won't I have control over it ?

 

I have no idea, it just doesn't want to work most of the time until after you load the OS. It may have to do with boot priority maybe? I dunno, I remember having this issue with windows sometimes too, when xp doesn't load properly and your suppose to decide course of action (safe mode, command prompt, etc) it doesn't like to work then. You can dodge this if you have USB keyboard handy though, but I'm guessing that you wont most of the time =).

Also, before you setup all these OS's your going to have to split up your hard drive into 3 partitions of course. I dont believe bootcamp allows you to do this. According to a few tutorials I've read, they all say to manually partition the drive using diskutil (I did it through the terminal, but think you can just use diskutility). You'd also have to make sure to make your Windows partition fat32. When you install linux, your going to change it's partition to ext3/ext2. All of this requires you to shrink your OSX partition so decide on space well.

just a little of the beginning of this triple booting journey hehe.