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Dual booting with Mint?
#44132 03/27/17 03:39 PM
Joined: Sep 2009
deniro Offline OP
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Is there a way to dual boot Linux Mint on my Mac? Given the complexities of booting any OS internally and externally.

I've already estabished that Mint will run live from a DVD.

Last edited by deniro; 03/27/17 03:40 PM.
Re: Dual booting with Mint?
deniro #44133 03/27/17 03:48 PM
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This may be naively simplistic, but can't you install it on a separate partition?


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Re: Dual booting with Mint?
artie505 #44134 03/27/17 05:38 PM
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Originally Posted By: artie505
This may be naively simplistic, but can't you install it on a separate partition?

That should work fine? You WILL need to pick a partition scheme that is compatible with both, however. (GUID) Winders gets more complicated because it really doesn't like to see anything beyond the 4th partition on a drive, and the EFI loader counts as one, so last I looked the best you could do is triple boot if winders was one of them. Mac OS X doesn't seem to care at all, I've partitioned out to 19. OS 9 was limited to 16 I think.


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Re: Dual booting with Mint?
Virtual1 #44475 05/01/17 09:10 PM
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deniro Offline OP
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There's a lot more to it than you might think. Got some good advice and bad advice, but unless you have the knowledge already there's going to be some trial and error, especially when Linux is involved, the sytem that "just doesn't work."

I got it to work by installing Refind via the command line. After getting the wrong advice, I found out how to do it correctly. Refind is a boot loader that gives a startup screen allowing you to choose what operating system you want to boot. I don't see why I had to dual boot. I thought I could simply install another OS, then go to startup disk whenever I wanted. But that didn't work. Nor did trying to install the Mint CD from an external CD drive. I had some trouble getting the Mac to work at all after that. Brief panic.

Getting it to work: I partitioned the hard drive using MSDOS (Fat). Per advice, I also made a swap partition, also in MSDOS (Fat), the reason being I only have 3 (or 4) GB of RAM in my Mac.

As I have come to expect from Linux, the Mint installer isn't obvious. Given a list of partions on my drive, in not the clearest manner, I installed Mint (from my internal CD drive) into a partion using EXT4 journaling file system, selected the mount point (slash, or /), changed the swap partion to EXT4, and selected Device for boot loader installation, which will be the same name as the new system. Sort of. It should be whatever you named your new parition when you created it (like Mint or Mint partition) but it shows up as sda4 or sda5 depending on what you already have on your drive. Some new alphabet soup for me.

Then you get to spend hours in the update manager. You don't have to, but it's a good idea, esp. if you want to run the latest version of Firefox. As in Ubuntu, the update manager is quite finicky. Lots of trial and error, trying different mirror sites, lots of waiting and watching unrealistic progress bars, trying to deciper the OS's instructions and responses, trying to figure out what oddly named files are for. Freezes and restarts for no apparent reason.

Scolling through and viewing the screensaver choices froze my computer. Then when I was gone, and the default screensaver kicked in, it froze my computer.

Installing the OS was slow. Startup is slow. Downloading is slow, when it works. You're expected to know the purpose of enigmatically named files. A typical Linux experience. It's a fiddly system that most people are better off leaving alone. On the plus side, the interface is attractive and snappy.


Re: Dual booting with Mint?
deniro #44566 05/11/17 09:12 PM
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deniro Offline OP
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Bugs seemed to be worked out. I'm dual booting Linux Mint on a ten-year-old Mac. It's quite zippy. Found my wireless printer with no problem. Nice desktop pics.

The internet experience might even be better on Mint than on the Mac. I should add that in Mint I can use the latest Firefox (53), while in 10.6 I'm stuck on Firefox 39.


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