My goal was to triple boot Mac OS X, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), and Windows XP on a single HDD. I started with a well used Mac OS X 10.5 install, totally up to date. I then had an also well used Windows XP install that I already had working with Bootcamp, Parallels and VMWare. Using Mac Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility) I tried to  make the current partition smaller by roughly 50GB as well as making a new partition in that space. Clicking apply produced a never-ending progress bar that I left “working” for more than half an hour. I became suspicios and google’d to find that Disk Utility does that sometimes, so I quit and tried these operations one at a time. Making the Macintosh HD partition smaller took a few minutes to apply, and then I added the other partition. Each of these gave an actual progress bar as opposed to the previous “working” bar.

I then downloaded the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 9.04, that was labelled as amd64, even though it is compatible with the Intel 64 bit chipsets. I was confused by this because I had previously seen 64 bit downloads listed as either x64 or x86_64, but apparently amd64 now refers to all of these, just because AMD were the first to release 64 bit chips. After burning the image using Toast, I restarted and held ‘c’ when my Mac Pro was booting so that it would boot from the CD. When the CD booted, I found that my “Apple keyboard with Numeric Keypad” (version at time of writing) didn’t seem to be recognised, so the keys were not working. Very strangely, when I connected an older keyboard in a front USB port, the newer one’s keys were now working. I would, as such, advise anyone trying this to have another keyboard close by, just in case, and good luck to anyone that this happens to and that doesn’t have a spare USB keyboard handy…

I then followed the simple installation wizard, except for two parts; the drive to install to, and the final option before clicking “Install”. The default in the installation when selecting a drive is to use the whole HDD. This would be a very bad idea! That would delete your OS X installation, which, I assume, you would not want to do. Choose “manual” and click next, which should then give you a window to choose which drive to install to. Given the same circumstances as my attempt, it would be safe to assume that you should be choosing “sda3″ which should be “HFS+” and using a minimal amount of HDD space already. You then want to format this as ext4. There is an ext2/3 driver for OS X (ext2fsx), but I was not able to mount the drive on a fully up to date Intel Mac Pro(1,1). I spent a lot of time on this, reformatting quite a number of times, but couldn’t get it to work. I read that it’s incompatible with Leopard on Intel, whihc is a shame, and I don’t see it being updated since the program hasn’t had a revision since 2006. I did not create a swap partition at this point and ignored the warning, but other users may want to do this (Keep in mind that it is possible to create a swap file on the partition later). You will also want to tick the box to format, and then choose the mount point as “/”. Follow the instructions up until the final “Install” button, which you should then click the “Advanced” button just above it, and choose to install GRUB on the same partition on which you are installing Ubuntu (for me, and I would assume most people, if any following this guide, was sda3).

At this point, I was not able to boot into Windows and neither Parallels/VMWare were working. If you don’t have it already, you should get MacFuse and ntfs-3g which will allow you to read/write your NTFS partition for Windows. Open boot.ini in TextEdit from the root directory of this drive, and change “partition(3)” to “partition(4)” wherever it appears. You then need to download rEFIt and burn a CD to boot from. Hold ‘c’ on boot to bring up rEFIt’s menu, and then choose to check the partition tables when it boots, and confirm if asked to fix it. If you like this rEFIt menu, then you can install that to the MBR from within OS X, but I prefer not having “rEFIt” written across the top whenever I wanted to change what OS I was booting to.

Remove the rEFIt CD and reboot the computer holding ‘alt’ and choose “Windows” from the two options that come up. This will either boot to Windows XP or Ubuntu’s boot-loader, GRUB. The first time I did this, it went to Windows XP, but the second time it went to GRUB (which I would prefer). You can then add Ubuntu to Windows XP’s boot-loader using bootpart, or you can add Windows XP to GRUB. This is a little annoying to have to choose “Windows” from OS X boot-loader and then being prompted again for Windows XP or Ubuntu, but I prefer that to rEFIt’s boot menu.

After booting into Ubuntu, it almost all worked straight away except for the wireless drivers, which I had to activate by logging in and then going to System>Administration>Hardware Drivers, click on “activate” for the wireless driver and then restart to be able to connect to my wireless network.

First impressions: “Wow, this is fast…”