Ubuntu/Kubuntu on Mac G5.

[Larry Grover]

Brian Durant wrote:

- snip -

>>> 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.
>>
>>
>> How, exactly, did you try to mount the partitions on the drive?   Did 
>> you get any error messages?
> 
> 
> I went into "disks". The other drive wasn't listed, but in Gparted it  
> showed up correctly. The fdisk command:
> fdisk -l /dev/sdb also worked.

You might try mounting it manually, from a terminal window.

You said earlier that sdb has one HFS+ partition on it and the rest is 
blank space.  Assuming the HFS+ partition is sdb, try:

sudo mkdir /mnt/hfs
sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdb1 /mnt/hfs

If that doesn't work, you might check to make sure that the HFS+ 
partition really is sdb1.

>>
>>> /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.
>>
>>
>> I always make a separate /home partition.  If for some reason you  
>> decide you need to do a reinstall, or install a different distro,  it 
>> makes things easier.
> 
> 
> Can /home also be shared between 2 Linux distros on a triple boot?

You can try it.  Two things to watch out for:
(1) If you want to use the same username and same home directory, you 
will need to make sure that the UIDs are the same for both linux 
distros.  For example, on Ubuntu, the first regular user on the system 
gets UID 10000.  Other distros may start at a different UID, like 500 (I 
think OSX does this, too).
(2) The config files in your home directory may not be compatible with 
the software in both distros, if the software versions are different enough.

>> You will need a newworld bootblock partition for the bootloader  
>> (yaboot).  Mine is 1 MB (I've read recommendations for 800 KB to 1  MB).
> 
> 
> Can I create these partitions by booting from the live-CD? I know  
> Gparted is there, but I am wondering if it is safe doing it from a  
> live-CD?

I think this should be safe.  Of course, if you have important data on 
sdb, you should make (and verify!) a backup first.  Also be careful you 
don't accidentally partion sda by mistake!

>>
>> Here are a couple of pages which may help you with partitioning.   
>> They are for installing debian on an iBook, but the information on  
>> partitioning should apply:
>>
>> http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/ibook/x139.html
>> http://www.miketec.org/ibook/
> 
> 
> Thanks. What I was thinking of was how you would propose that I  divvied 
> up 80 GB on an extra internal HD, where around 10-20 should  be used for 
> sharing between the booting systems?

On my iBook, with a 30 GB disk, I currently have:

7.0 GB HFS+ partition for OSX
6.5 GB for / partition (ext3)
14 GB for /home partition (ext3)

the rest of the disk is used up by swap and about 10 small partitions 
that OSX created (driver partitions?)

My / partition is only about 77% filled, so you probably don't need much 
more than that for /.  Since I tend to collect some pretty large data 
files in my home directory, I like to allocate as much room for /home as 
I can.  10-20 GB should be plenty for sharing between OSX and linux, but 
it will really depend on what you want to share.  For music, that might 
be enough, but if you want to share lots of large files (videos, etc), 
this might be too small.

I'd suggest something like:
1 MB for the bootstrap partition
6-8 GB for /
10-20 GB for your FAT32 "sharing" partition
and the rest of the space for /home

Regards,
Larry