Background:<p>I've owned laptops for the past 13 years, starting with a Toshiba satellite pro and latest with a Lenovo Thinkpad X61. I've played around with various flavors of windows from '95, NT 4 to 2000, XP and server 2003. Also played around with linux flavors, focusing on Slackware, Redhat then fedora core and now Debian.<p>I just bought a Macbook pro (base 15" model). For my work I need to develop platform specific software for all 3 major platforms (Linux, OS X, Windows XP (thankfully our IT staff has deferred Vista. )), in addition to server software which will run on Linux for production.<p>So I'm reading through the Apple bootcamp docs and looking over my web searches for tutorials and info on triple booting Leopard, Debian and Windows XP. Do any of you work with this kind of configuration and what suggestions do you have?<p>I'm assuming that I'm going to just scrub my factory install and create four partitions (one for each OS, and one win32 for share)<p>The thing I'm concerned with the most is dealing with weirdness in maintaining the configuratino.
Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks!
Personally, I am very happy with VMWare Fusion on my Macbook Pro. I can comfortably run OS X and other platforms running simultaneously, in my case: Ubuntu, Debian and Windows XP.<p>4 GB of RAM isn't strictly necessary but makes things more comfortable. I fully agree with jballanc about Spaces and full screen mode - that is really nice!<p>Consider also that VMWare has good support for virtual networking. For instance, you can have your Debian server running in one virtual machine serving desktop clients running in their own virtual machines. Testing client/server stuff that way has saved me lots of time.
Any reason not to virtualize? With the most recent MBP, you should be able to run all three OSes simultaneously without too much degradation in performance. Pro tip: Combine full screen virtualization with spaces for best experience. ;-)
I have Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux running on my unibody 13" MacBook. There are a couple of things to watch out for. You can only have three partitions, because the GPT / MBR synching only supports four and one is used as an EFI partition. Windows has to be the last partition or it won't boot. The Bootcamp software will only create split your partition into two (three, with the EFI partition) - just use disk utility or the diskutil command line tool to do the partitioning. Make a backup first.
what i'do is the following: run bootcamp assistant and create an extra partition. (make it big enough for the 2 OS's).<p>then run the linux installer, split up the free partition, in any way you like). Install linux on it. Then run de windows installer using the leftover partition.<p>i also suggest to install rEfit so that you can fix your guid partition table to be able to select each OS at startup.