Installing Linux on a Mac, the hard way
I was going to make a post about this, but honestly I think this will be more useful.
It is possible.
Don't do it.
The end.
I tried it, and successfully booted Ubuntu 8.10 on my MacBook Pro. I'm sure if you look around you could find the same guide I used, but here's the verdict: It just didn't work very well. Drivers were buggy and mouse control was awful. I just didn't see any reason to keep it around, especially since OS X is such a close relative of Linux anyways. Unfortunately when I tried to remove it, the swap partition simply wouldn't budge. Trust me, I tried every possible method for reformatting that partition, but no dice. Long story short, I ended up reformatting the whole hard drive just to get everything back together. Many hours sunk, no progress made, NOT WORTH IT! You'll be better off putting it on your old windows box or just using virtualization.
If you tried it yourself, why don't you comment here on how it went.
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April 7th, 2011 - 18:56
one word: virtualization. If you want to play with Linux, get VMWare ($40 if you’re a student) or VirtualBox (Free). They work reasonably well, and I’ve been known to create test servers using them that I could break and never worry about.
Performance ain’t half bad either, as long as you have enough RAM.
April 14th, 2011 - 13:20
Yeah, there’s always that. I was trying to get a native install using an alternate bootloader, but the drivers just aren’t stable (or even made in some cases). I currently use Bootcamp with Windows 7, and also optionally run it in a Parallels VM. For windows, there’s plenty of driver support, and you can even use the native mac bootloader.
My point in posting it was basically.. considering the lack of support, there’s no legitimate reason to attempt a Mac/Linux dual boot.