4/10/2024 0 Comments Mac boot camp os selectDuring the setup project, we will have to download the rEFIt program, which takes care of the initial boot screen, and we’ll also use the Boot Camp software from Apple, which takes care of setting up all the necessary drivers for Windows to work on a Mac (you could do that by hand without Boot Camp, but I don’t think it’s worth it). All that goes beyond the scope of this post, and those issues may well have been solved in newer versions of Linux (as I’m writing this, there’s a Fedora 15 alpha version, which I haven’t tried yet). Installing Linux in basic mode means that we will have to manually install graphic card drivers later, as well as drivers for the wireless connection and the audio card. I had the same problem with the latest version of Ubuntu. I did it with Fedora 14, which I had to install in the Basic Video mode because the standard mode doesn’t recognise the Mac Mini’s graphics hardware. The steps I describe in this post require that you have a Mac computer and the installation disks for Mac OS X, Windows 7 and a Linux distribution. And so, for a bit more than €1,000 I got a brand new Mac Mini with the latest versions of the main desktop operating systems. And then I downloaded an image of the installation disk for 64-bit Fedora 14, which is free, of course. I bought a Windows 7 Professional licence from the Spanish Microsoft online store which set me back €309. Unlike Apple with Mac OS X and non-Apple hardware, Microsoft will allow you to install Windows on any computer that can run it. So I decided to go the whole hog and installed the three operating systems. However, I thought that for my purposes it was safer to have three full installations and avoid any possible pitfalls and glitches due to the emulation/compatibility layer. There are good emulators like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop, and you can also run Windows programs on a Mac using the Wine compatibility layer software. Note that having a full installation for each operating system is not really necessary in order to run Windows and Linux programs on a Mac. I did this on a Mac Mini, but I expect everything should be the same for other Mac computers. I managed to do this thanks to a couple of interesting articles I found on the web (see the references section below), but I came across a few problems along the way, so I thought I would write down a detailed description of the steps I followed for future reference, and for the benefit of others who may want to do the same. In this post, I’m going to explain how I did set up the triple boot. Now that I’ve been using it for three months, I am quite happy with it, especially because I installed Windows 7 and Linux (Fedora 14) on it, so I can use it for cross-platform development, switching between operating systems without the need to have separate machines. I didn’t really want to get a new monitor and a keyboard and a mouse that would join the stockpile of hardware lying around, so the Mac Mini concept made sense. Now the Mac Mini is just a box that you connect to a monitor, and this was the perfect arrangement for me since I already have a monitor and several keyboards and mice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |