Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10. Dual-Boot and Beyond

Mac OS X isn’t the only operating system you can run on your Mac. Right about now, some of you are probably saying to yourself, “Huh?”, but stay with me here. There are many PowerPC-based operating systems that run great on Apple hardware, including Linux, NetBSD, BeOS, and many others. But who says you have to run one operating system at a time? And who says it has to be a PowerPC-based operating system?

There is an array of bewildering choices when it comes to mixing and matching operating systems. Do you need run Linux on your PowerBook so you can write code for a client? Sure, no problem. How about running Linux under Mac OS X? Also, no problem. Do you want to run Mac OS X on an x86 Linux machine? You can even do that, if you are patient. Here are some of the combinations we’ll look at in this chapter:

Running on the Bare Metal

If you want to run an alternative operating system on your Mac, there are many choices available. Linux and NetBSD will run on just about any kind of Mac, all the way back to the 68k-based Macintoshes. BeOS can run on many of the pre-G3 Power Macs, but most of the current BeOS development is on the x86 version, so this might be of curiosity value only. To boot into another operating system on your Mac, you’ll need to erase or repartition your drive. We’ll talk about this in the "Linux on Mac Hardware" section of this chapter; much of what you read in that section will apply to other operating systems as well.

Running on ...