Dual Booting the MacBook: Linux and OS X

Building on my experience getting a reasonably usable Lion install going, and finally getting Linux up and running... I wiped the 120GB SanDisk drive and installed Lion first, partitioning the drive in two and setting the second partition up to be “free space.” I had kinda borked the install the first time around, and could not figure out why the USB installer was booting straight into the “Installing” screen and then throwing an error: “There was a problem installing ‘Mac OS X’. Try reinstalling.

Rebuilding the USB installation media, and zeroing and repartitioning the hard drive, had no effect. Turns out I needed to zap the PRAM (start up the machine holding down Command-Option-R-P).

I then installed Lubuntu in the unused space, with a 200MB /boot/efi FAT32 partition (with the “boot” flag set), and a 1GB swap partition. Everything seems to work great, I can boot between the operating systems by holding down the “Option” key at startup.

Best of both worlds. I get the latest software in the Linux side, and the familiarity of the Mac on the Lion side (plus things like Rocksmith).

Had fun getting this working while watching the Rams eek out a win over the Colts.

This time around, I used the openjdk “bundle,” and installed Command Line Tools (OS X Lion) for Xcode - November 2012 instead of the full Xcode 4.2.1. Note, mercurial - and thus Java 8 - won't install without the full Xcode.

$ sudo mv /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Info.plist /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Info.plist.disabled
$ /usr/libexec/java_home -VMatching Java Virtual Machines (1):
    1.7.0, x86_64:    ""    /Users/wingedgeek/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home

/Users/wingedgeek/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home
$ javac -version
javac 1.7.0-u80-unofficial