Re: Duel Booting Debian on a Mac

Am 27.01.2015 um 13:00 schrieb Jonathan Copeland <jonathan.mcopeland@icloud.com>:

Hi Debian Community

I am a student at the University of Pretoria and I need to have Debian installed on my Mac for my degree,

The only requirements that we’ve been notified of are that we’re meant to be able to run Debian in our Computers
and that we are to be able to submit Projects.

I’d like to partition the disk and install Debian in a duel boot using 100gb, like when you duel Boot to Windows.

My Mac’s details are the following;
15” Macbook Pro retina
2,5 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB
500gb SSD

It depends on the model of the Mac, the firmware and the version of OSX, if it is easy and works without problems.

I did it following the usual HOWTOs [1] on a MacAir Mid 2013, installing reFind, shrinking the OSX partition on the 128 GB SSD to 60 GB, and installing Debian on the free space.

Of course you should backup your disk before shrinking with e.g. TimeMachine.

In the end I uninstalled Debian because of the following problems:

1. The brightness of the screen does not readjust after suspend/resume in Debian (I worked hard trying to solve this with some published hacks, but no full success).

2. Often the Mac got hot with closed lid, eating the battery. This seems caused by the above firmware manipulation hack.

3. Ugrades of OSX seem to damage the reFind configuration. Also there is a problem writing the hidden rescue partition during an upgrade of OSX.

[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/187410/how-to-install-and-dual-boot-linux-on-a-mac/

What’s the best and safest way that I can do this?

Install VirtualBox on OSX and install Debian in VirtualBox. This is the safest way. The disadvantage of a virtualized Debian are some restrictions in using hardware like USB-devices, and degraded performance.

Another way, which I choosed, is doing your tasks directly in OSX, using e.g. homebrew, perlbrew. Many packages available for Debian can also be compiled and installed under OSX, but sometimes it is boring and time consuming. This depends on the tasks and details. But I am happy with this way, mainly developping in Perl, C, C++ in OSX on one of best lightweight (1 kg) laptops, with a battery allowing 9 hours of work.