Apple PowerBook G4 Dual Boot: Mac OS X 10.4 & Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)

The piece of information that you are about to read is not new. It’s a complete rewrite of what Rich Burridge has already written about:”How to set up a dual boot configuration on a Power Book with Mac OS X and Ubuntu.” Then why am I scribbling it down all over again? Well, I just followed Rich’s post last night and managed to see through a text book installation of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my 15” PowerBook G4 machine without spoiling the existing installation of Mac OS X 10.4. So my intention here is to bring into everyone’s attention the error-free steps written by Rich Burridge(in case if you have missed it), and may be add a couple of illustrations to it, hoping it would be some amount help to a larger audience. So let’s do it:

Here’s the configuration of my 15” Power Book G4:

Let me repeat what Rich emphasized in his blog loud and clear: Take a back up of your data before you start doing this. Having a back up of your important data is good under all circumstances, leave alone a situation, when you would be resizing a harddisk partition, which has your Mac OS X and all important files, created over a long period of time. So back it up please.

Before booting your machine using the Ubuntu Desktop Edition CD that you could download from this location, disable journaling on your Macintosh HD by logging into Mac OS X, opening a terminal and performing the commands that are displayed in the image below:

Once the above step is performed, boot your machine using the Ubuntu Edgy Eft CD, downloadable from this location and while doing so, hold down the key ‘c’ on your keypad (even before the Apple logo is displayed on the screen). Once Ubuntu is up and running using the Live CD, open a Terminal by going to Applications -> Accessories menu and type the following command:

sudo parted

Now, here is an image of my terminal from Ubuntu Live CD for your reference to see what I did to re-partition my 80 GB Macintosh Harddisk (56 GB was already used by the MacOS X) to have a 20GB partition created for the installation of Ubuntu:

Once the above-mentioned step is performed, double click on the install icon on the Live CD, to install the Ubuntu OS to your harddisk. The installation wizard is quite self-explanatory and when you hit a page in the wizard, which would ask you for the partitioning details, mention to the installer to ‘use the largest contiguous space available.’ Once that’s done, wait for 30 minutes (~) and you would get a PowerBook machine configured to boot either Mac OS X or Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

My parents stay at my native place. If my mother was here last night and had stepped into my room, I am sure she wouldn’t have quite liked the look of my room with so many number of cables and other accessories lying around. I had to clean up the mess before I sat down to write down my experience on setting up my PowerBook G4 for a dual boot. Thanks to Rich Burridge, it was a clean text book installation. But my mouse is behaving so slow in Ubuntu. I am hoping that some kind reader of my blog would help me in sorting that out. Else, I am planning to pick up an external USB mouse.

Thankfully, Rich has not ‘patented’ his blog entry, for if he had done something of that sort, then probably he would taken legal action against me for supplementing his information with my illustrations for the good of all. You know what I am talking about, don’t you?.

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