Ubuntu/Kubuntu on Mac G5.

[Brian Durant]

On 18. jan 2006, at 4.55, Larry Grover wrote:

>
>> I want to install Kubuntu Dapper Flight 3 on a second SATA  
>> internal  drive. In the system profile, my Macintosh HD shows up  
>> with "disk0s3"  as the BSD name, whereas the HD I want to install  
>> on has the BSD name  of "disk1s3". Does the command for "sata/ 
>> scsi: sudo mount -t hfsplus / dev/sdaX /mount/point" still apply  
>> for Ubuntu/Kubuntu?
>
> I'm a little fuzzy on how the BSD partition names map onto the  
> linux names (I've only got one dual boot OSX/linux system, and it  
> is in linux 99% of the time), but the second SATA drive in the  
> system (disk1 in BSD) should be sdb (second SCSI/SATA drive); s3  
> should be either partition 3 or 4 in linux, so either sdb3 or sdb4.
>
> If you boot the Dapper live CD you can probably figure it out using  
> the fdisk command:
> fdisk -l /dev/sdb
> should list the partitions on the second SATA drive, and you should  
> be able to figure out which linux partion is disk1s3 from the size.

OK, I tried that and it seems to have found it. Gnome seems to see  
both my 152.7 GB Maxtor (Macintosh HD) and the other internal drive  
that appears to be the 74.5 GB /sdb. When I tried to mount them  
however, nothing seemed to happen. /sdb has a 21.53 GB HFS +  
partition, and 53 GB of free space. What I would like to do is to  
create some partitions on /sdb, while running the live-CD, to prepare  
for installing Ubuntu. I was thinking of doing something like this:

Partition #1 boot				16 MB	Debian Bootstrap
Partition #2 swap				2 GB	Debian swap space
Partition #3 ReiserFS			44.5 GB	Debian root file system
Partition #4 fat32				8 GB	Shared Fat32 file system
Partition #5 HFS + (Journalled) 20GB Mac OS X file system

1) In some ways, I think I might like a home partition as well.
2) Does mounting and sharing an HFS + partition between Mac OS X and  
Ubuntu work these days? If not, then the HFS + partition isn't really  
relevant. Then the FAT32 should be made larger and a home partition  
added.

OS X (not sure about Tiger) has an issue with FAT32 that I found on a  
debian posting:

"...It occurred to me that both OS X and Linux 2.4 have pretty solid  
support for
FAT32. I could reformat and use my 1.5Gb "shared" partition as FAT32  
under
Linux quite happily using 'mkdosfs -F 32' and mounting it with the vfat
filesystem. Lovely. Indeed, I could mount the same partition under  
MacOS X
from the shell, however I couldn't persuade MacOS to automount it and  
make it
appear on my desktop, because OS X thought it was an HFS partition  
without a
correctly formatted HFS volume due to its type entry in the partition  
map.

Much fiddling later I discovered the solution: Mac OS X will discover  
and
mount the partition correctly as FAT32 if you set the partition type  
to the
magic string "DOS_FAT_32". In mac-fdisk, use the 'd' to delete your  
partition,
then use the 'C' (capital C!) option to create a new one covering  
exactly the
same sectors on the disk, then enter the type as "DOS_FAT_32". I  
partitioned
under Linux and then formatted under OS X using the Disk Tool in  
Utilities."

At any rate, I need to have a partition that I can mount in the live- 
CD, that I can return to and mount in OS X, should I run into a  
partitioning problem, so that I can save output text to.

Is there anyway you can advise me in the above and ehlp flesh out my  
strategy and advise me on my partition mount problems?

Cheers,

Brian