Bexley IT Solutions

I ran into a bit of a problem with my dual boot MacBook Pro the other day. I was booted into OS X, and I was prompted by the operating system to install a bunch of system updates that had been released since I last used the OS. When I attempted to download and install them, I was informed that I did not have enough free disk space. This surprised me, as I had installed OS X onto a 20GB partition, and I had not installed any office suite or other large applications; I perform all my work when booted into Fedora, only using OS X for web browsing - checking email, online shopping, BBC iPlayer, You Tube, etc.

I checked my hard disk usage, and it only amounted to just shy of 15GB ; I would have thought this should have been plenty of space to download and extract the updates I had pending. However, as OS X didn't seem to think so, I was stuck. I'm quite concerned with IT security, so you can imagine my dismay at realising I would be unable to keep my operating system up to date!

Monolingual - A Quick Fix

A colleague of mine suggested I try Monolingual - it's an application that allows you to remove unneeded localisation data from your OS X installation, as well as any unnecessary binaries that are compiled for different architectures (Intel, PowerPC, etc.). Unfortunately, I was only able to clear a couple of hundred megabytes of data, so I was still unable to run the system update, which left me with the unenviable task of trying to increase the size of the OS X partition.

Before I continued, I ensured that I had backed up all of my important data off the laptop - messing around with partition tables can leave your machine unusable, not to mention the possibility of accidentally deleting a partition!

Partition Resizing

My next step was to boot from the OS X installation DVD, and attempt to use the Disk Utility to modify the partition table. I had a second HFS+ partition positioned directly after the OS X partition - the idea being that I could use this partition to share files between both operating systems on the disk. The Apple Disk Utility allows you to resize HFS+ partitions, however, I could not shrink the second HFS+ partition without leaving the recovered space after the partition, which then meant I would be unable to reassign it to the first HFS+ partition. This meant that I had to delete the second HFS+ partition, resize the first, and then recreate the second partition in the space remaining.
When I tried this, however, the Disk Utility simply hung while displaying the message "Preparing to delete volume"; I did actually leave it "preparing" for a good hour while I had dinner, but no progress seemed to have been made when I returned, so I cancelled the operation. As the Disk Utility seemed unable to remove the partition, I booted off the Fedora 9 installation DVD into rescue mode and used the GNU parted tool to remove the second HFS+ partition - which worked without complaints. I restarted the machine and booted off the OS X install DVD to try and resize the OS X partition with the Disk Utility, however, this hung as before; displaying the message "Preparing to resize volume".

I could have tried using GNU parted to resize the partition, but this probably wouldn't have worked, so that left me with one more option before I would have to bite the bullet and perform a complete reinstall of both operating systems: I deleted the OS partition using GNU parted, and then attempted to run through the OS X install, creating a new partition in the space available at the beginning of the disk. The Disk Utility, however, refused to create any new partitions on the disk... I was going to have to wipe the disk completely and start from scratch!

Complete Reinstall

After having made the decision to completely reinstall, it was a fairly painless process - I simply followed the procedure from my original article, but installed Fedora 9 instead of Fedora 8.

Once I had my laptop "fully armed and operational" again (well, at least with two operating systems installed), I checked the OS X partition to see just how much space a fresh install of OS X would consume. I was extremely surprised to find that 11GB of valuable hard disk space had been used - this is as much as a fresh install of Vista! Now admittedly, there are probably quite a lot of compatibility libraries to allow Rosetta to work, as well as binaries for the various architectures that OS X supports, but this still seems like a large amount of program data!

Anyway, the moral of this story is to ensure you leave plenty of space for OS X, should you be partitioning your hard drive before installing the operating system. This won't affect most Mac users, just those of you that either partition your disk for whatever purpose.

This weekend, I've successfully installed both OS X "Leopard" and Fedora 8 on a new MacBook Pro - it was pretty painless, and I'm impressed with the results.

Before I started, I read an article on the Mactel Linux site titled "MacBook Pro (Santa Rosa) with Fedora 7". I used this as a rough guide - I knew I may run into some differences as I was going to be installing Fedora 8. One pleasant surprise was that I could actually install from the built in DVD drive, rather than using an external device or performing a network install. I assume they have incorporated the relevant drivers into the installer. Also, because I performed a fresh install of OS X and left space on the hard disk for Fedora, I found that the Bootcamp application wasn't actually required. In fact, I could not run Bootcamp from OS X; when I tried, the application informed me that my existing partition scheme wasn't supported, and I couldn't continue.

Installation Steps

These are the basics steps I took to achieve my dual boot system:

Install OS X

Using the disk utility on the Leopard installation DVD, I created a 20GB partition for OS X, and another 20GB partition for media and/or scratch space

Install Fedora 8

Rather than using the partitioning tool in the Fedora installer, I booted the installation DVD into rescue mode, and created my partitions with parted, then rebooted and ran the Fedora installer. My reasoning for using this method is that parted supports EFI partition tables and I would have greater control over the positioning of my partitions on the disk. I still used the Fedora partitioning tool to create my LVM volumes

Install rEFIt

I rebooted back into OS X and installed rEFIt as per the instructions in the Mactel howto. However, when I ran the rEFIt partitioning tool, I received a message telling me that the partition table was already up to date - maybe this was a result of using parted instead of the Fedora partition manager.

So far, I have been unable to get the Airport Extreme card working, which uses the Atheros 5418 chipset. Rather than installing from sources retrieved from the Madwifi subversion repositories, as detailed in the Mactel Linux howto, I installed the Madwifi drivers from the livna.org rpm repository. Usually, this is my preferred method for installing the Madwifi drivers because you don't have to recompile the drivers from source when you update the kernel. However, the drivers failed to detect the device. I found a bug report on the Madwifi site, detailing what I believe is the same issue and asking asking when support for the 5418 chipset will be added. Reading the comments, it seems that support is available in the 0.9.4 release of the driver, however, the drivers from the livna repository are currently at version 0.9.3.3. I uninstalled the drivers from the repository, and grabbed a copy of the latest source from the Madwifi subversion repository. I was unable to apply the patches from the Aircrack site that allow packet injection whilst in monitor mode - the driver simply wouldn't compile. The driver compiled fine with no patch applied, so I decided to stick with that and try patching later. With the drivers working, I tried to use the NetworkManager applet to connect to a wireless network. It picked up wireless networks in the area, but couldn't seem to join one - the card appeared to be associated to the access point, but didn't seem to receive an IP address. I'll update the article once I've carried out further tests.

After I completed the installation, I realised that the Macbook Pro has a Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, which means it has 64-bit architecture - and I'd installed the i386 version of Fedora 8! This was possibly not a bad thing - I have found in the past that there were generally less prebuilt packages available for 64-bit versions of Linux distributions, and I had to compile a lot more from source. However, I really wanted to squeeze every ounce of performance out of my machine, so I decided to re-install with the x86-64 version of Fedora. I just installed over the top of the previous instance and didn't run into any problems, in fact, once the installation of Fedora was complete, the system was ready for use.

To finish off my installation with all the relevant drivers, media applications and codecs, etc., I will be following the Personal Fedora 8 Installation Guide. The guy responsible for this howto seems to have one to cover most of the Fedora releases, I know I've used the guides for Fedora 5 through to 8 now. Below are two lists; one of cool features and one of annoyances that I've found during my use of Fedora 8:

Cool Features

• The HFS+ partitions created for OS X are recognised by Fedora, and show up as another partition that is mountable in the Nautilus file browser.
• The new version of Evolution prompts you for an attachment if you try and send an email containing the word "attachment" but forgot to attach a file!

Problems

• RhythmBox no longer seems to detect my iRiver H340 device when it's mounted. A minor inconvenience, although it did used to work flawlessly under Fedora 7 - however, I found a thread in the Ubuntu support forums that detailed a solution

*Update*There is a new article on the Mactel-Linux page that specifically details installing Fedora 8 on a MacBook Pro. *Update*