[Offtopic] Dual booting Macs

[Glen Turner]

Dianne Ruffles wrote:
> schools you may know who are using dual booting Macs with students.

Macs will happily triple-boot MacOS, Windows and Linux.

  - Mac boots using EFI
  - Linux boots using EFI (Fedora 9 but no third-party
    binary drivers) or BIOS
  - Windows boots using BIOS

The BIOS on a Mac is an emulation. One of the jobs of the
Bootcamp program is to install the EFI firmware for the
BIOS emulation.

As for partitioning, the least-hassle approach is to
wipe the machine and partition from scratch, but this
requires a fair bit of technical gumption. Otherwise
you can install MacOS and then
  - use Bootcamp to resize the MacOS volume.
  - install Windows (the drivers for Windows Xp can
    be obtained by running Bootcamp and writing a
    driver CD).
  - use Linux installer to resize the Windows volume.

You can use rEFIt to control the booting. This works more
nicely than the other options I tried.

Apple ship firmware updates on an auto-installing CD image,
firmware updates for the DVD writer have to be installed
from MacOS. So it's well worth installing all the various
firmware before beginning. Also, if you're going to run
just Linux you'll need to scarf the firmware for the
Atheros wireless from the MacOS volume before it disappears.

Which two operating systems did you have in mind? If
you just want MacOS and Windows Xp then Bootcamp does
a fine job.

There's also a lot to be said for running an virtual
machine. For example, you can return the VM to a
known state very easily, which can make life much
easier if people fiddle.

-- 
  Glen Turner