On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 12:35 PM Jonas Smedegaard <
jonas@jones.dk> wrote:
Quoting Kenneth Parker (2020-02-13 18:03:20)
> I am helping a friend install Debian on an older MacBook, running OS X
> 10.11 (El Capitan). It currently has a single 300G HFS Plus (Journaled)
> Partition, with lots of free space.
>
> He wants to keep OS X, and use Buster (or Sid, leading to the next Stable
> Release).
>
> He wants to shrink the Mac Partition, create a couple more for this. (I
> explained the need for two, including a Swap Partition to him).
>
> He thinks that Debian should be able to work on the same HFS Plus Disk
> format. Has anyone tried this?
>
> This is all preliminary now, as I am trying to talk him into ext4 for the
> Debian Partition and, if he needs a place to share files, put a small,
> fourth vfat Partition in for that.
Debian (and Linux in general) supports read-write access to HFS+
partitions, but it is unreliable. I would expect it to be difficult to
setup and the result would be unreliable (either because you would end
up depending on the unreliable HFS+ write access, or because you would
end up having a too complex to reliably maintain stack of hacks to work
around the unreliable HFS+ write access).
I have read up on this HFS+ file system and concur completely. My friend didn't like my answer (don't use HFS+ for Linux) at all, putting the whole "project" in question. More on another reply.
Thanks! Kenneth Parker