Dual Booting My Mac - Attempt 1

I had a very exciting weekend of dual booting my Mac with OS X and OpenSolaris. There were many frustrations, arguments and battles that, unfortunately, ended in a complete wipe of my Mac :( ( this is why we backup, right? )

I was given an OpenSolaris DVD at the kernel developer conference in 2009 and I'd never actually used it. I thought, now was as good a time as any to give it a shot.

The livecd is pretty useful. Essentially, if everything works when you boot off the disk, everything will work once it's installed. Nice concept and it seemed to work in practice.

The only real problems I had were relating to this bug. This basically meant I couldn't use any partition bootcamp had created. I can't think of any reason why this is, but I spent hours trying different ways to present a partition and ended up wiping the whole table to get OpenSolaris to install.

After wiping the partition table and using refit to boot my Mac, I installed OpenSolaris with no real troubles. Wireless was working, X was configured correctly, mouse was working, flash worked (big plus). Everything seemed to be running fine, except sound ... not to worry.

OpenSolaris was a little different from what I'm used to. It seems very Linuxy to me. I'm not sure if this is due to the Linux developers moving over to OpenSolaris or is Sun ( read Oracle ) are aiming more at the Linux market. All in all, it's still got the same Solaris base and I'm happy enough with that.

There were a lot of pre-installed applications such as, firefox, pidgin etc. All other applications were easily installable through the package management system. I was surprised I even found netbeans and tomcat in there. On another note, if you're updating your system using this application, it will create the ABE for you - very nice touch that really impressed me.

After having a good play with OpenSolaris, I decided to re-install OS X on, what I thought to be, free space. Well, it seems I still don't understand how OS X needs the disk setup because I had to wipe the partition table again to install a GUID partition map (whatever that is).

I installed OS X on a 40g partition and left the other 40g as free space with the hope OpenSolaris will reside there. I must note, I haven't attempted dual booting again, but I'm now running snow leopard, so the above mentioned bug may have been fixed in this version of bootcamp.