partioning power pc and OSX/ubuntu dualboot

[Romeyn Prescott]

At 11:35 AM +0100 11/21/04, altern scribbled:
>hi
>
>I am reading the "Installation How To - PowerPC" in the Support 
>section of ubuntu website.
>in "Partition your disk" it says :
>
>"If you do not want to erase an entire disk, or if you want to 
>customize the partition layout, choose "Manually edit partition 
>table" from the menu"
>
>what does this exactly mean? will then erase my osx partition and i 
>will loose my data?
>Or will this create new partitions on the empty space taken from my 
>osx partition, (similar to the way SuSE linux does when you intall 
>in over winXP), without erasing the osx instalation?.
>
>if the later is the case, how reliable would this be? i mean 
>paritioning is always a delicate process. Is there any 
>recomendations to do before doing this? maybe some maintenace tasks 
>on osx that would be helpful?
>
>THen my second question is:
>I would like to have a partition where i can hold all my data and i 
>would like to be able to access (read and write) this partition both 
>from Ubuntu and OSX. is this posible? how would i partition my HD to 
>achive so?
>

This last part is a very interesting idea.  I'll get to it in a 
minute.  First, though, I don't recommend doing ANY sort of 
partitioning on any disk that has data on it without having a full 
backup of that data in place.  It's too easy to do something wrong 
and lose everything.  I know in recent years there has been developed 
software that can resize an active partition without erasing it 
first, but I'm too Old School to ever completely trust such a 
process...it seems too much like Voodoo!

That said, I doubt the Ubuntu installer is going to give you the 
luxury of shrinking your existing OS X partition in order to make 
room for Ubuntu.  (I'll be pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong 
about this!)  But if I'm right, you'll have to back up your stuff and 
then partition your drive for your new dual-boot configuration.

Your idea of a shared "Home" partition is interesting.  There are 
instructions for moving Home in Mac OS X here:

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html

I have done this successfully.  There are two questions to be 
answered, however:  1) Can the Home partition serving Mac OS X be UFS 
(ext3?) and 2) do Linux and OS X have any preference files in common 
(name) that are incompatible?

It's an intriguing idea.  If I have time this week, I may just try 
it!  No promises, though!!

...ROMeyn
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