In article <uYLah.8053$> ,
"Mark Rae" <> wrote:
> Evening all,
>
> Following on from a similar thread of a week or so ago, I have a Mac Mini
> with an 80Gb hard disk and 512Mb RAM. Obviously, it came with MacOSX
> preinstalled, which I have updated with the latest patches etc and "About
> this Mac" tells me it is currently running MacOSX 10.4.8.
>
> The main reason for purchasing the Mac Mini in the first place was because I
> needed to be able to test the websites I develop on browsers running on
> operating systems other then Windows - however, I didn't need a "whole" Mac
> (bad adjective, but you know what I mean) so the Mac Mini seemed a perfect
> choice. It's currently sharing my PS/2 keyboard and mouse and VGA flat
> screen via a Belkin 4-way KVM, exactly as it is designed to do.
>
> I recently had a problem with the said KVM whereby the Mac Mini would not
> "recognise" the standard key presses during bootup - by that, I mean that
> holding down the 'C' key did not force the Mac Mini to boot from the CD
> instead of the hard disk, holding down the Alt key did not launch the boot
> options, holding down the F12 key did not eject the CD etc.
>
> After contacting Belkin, they said that the above problem was almost
> certainly due to the fact that the Mac Mini was not recognising the USB
> keyboard through the KVM switch until the OS had started to load from the
> hard disk, by which time it was too late to make any startup choices. Not
> particularly impressed with that, but the explanation did seem reasonable,
> so I purchased a very fetching Macally keyboard from some very nice people
> on eBay, which worked perfectly.
>
> OK, so far so good.
>
> Now that I've been using the Mac Mini for a little while, and find that I
> like it much more than I was expecting to, I am keen to install Ubuntu on it
> to test how my websites run on Linux versions of the various browsers. So, I
> downloaded the latest Ubuntu for Mac OS image, and burned it to a CD. I had
> been advised by others here that I would obviously need to partition the Mac
> Mini's hard disk so that Ubuntu could be installed into a separate
> partition - no problem - I'm perfectly used to that sort of thing from the
> Windows world, so I got myself a copy of iPartition and partitioned the hard
> disk non-destructively. Now my Mac Mini's 80Gb hard disk is partitioned into
> two 40Gb partitions, the first of which has the MacOSX installation.
>
> Now I need your help with the next steps.
>
> Does Ubuntu need to installed in the first partition? If so, can I backup
> the entire MacOSX partition onto my USB hard drive (which the Mac Mini
> recognises and works with perfectly), and then restore it into the second
> partition later so that it's bootable?
>
> Does either MacOSX or Ubuntu give me the option of choosing which partition
> to boot from WITHOUT having to hold the Alt / Option key down while the
> system powers up? I guess, a sort of equivalent of the Windows boot.ini
> functionality?
>
> Any assistance gratefully received.
>
> Mark
2 alternatives. Assuming an intel Mac mini, get Parallels and
run Ubuntu in Virtual Machine.
Or why not use a "Live CD" of Ubuntu, where you run Ubuntu off of
the CD and avoid actually installation.
"Live CD"s of other versions of Linux are also available.
Bob Harris
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