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As I used to work in IT, I liked to have an easy setup for the systems I use at home. While I was still considering to return to earning money with my nerd skills, I even ran my own web server as kind of a showpiece, but that times have long gone.

My preference for Mac systems remained until recently. For a long time of my life, these systems offered simply the most trouble free solutions for my sometimes exquisite demands. However, as I reduced my consumerist ways drastically, and don't like the idea to spend money every so often to get a decent system, I needed alternatives.

I hesitated for a long time to go the Intel way - but some years ago, when my PowerPC based MacBook went into a HDD nirvana, I got myself a shiny Macbook, and got even a free iPod touch on top of the deal.

For quite some time this remained a relatively satisfying solution. You get OpenOffice, I didn't mind to shell out some money for Photoshop elements, and what I wanted to do on a computer works out in satisfying speed. After all, no longer professionally working in IT, I had only little comparison to other systems, so things looked fine.

My preference for multi-tasking brought performance to a limit though. At some point, I let go of the familiar Firefox, and switched to Chromium, with lots of google integration which seemed to make life easier from a user perspective. However, lately I got pretty annoyed about the frequent stalls, not only with Chrome, but also with the entire system.

Depending on how many things ran in parallel, the system just denied me even switching application without either the rainbow, or no reaction at all. As I got myself a Windows based laptop for some other task, which now mainly runs on Ubuntu, I considered upgrading my Macbook to Ubuntu as well.

That was about four days ago, and I still struggle to get it working. Doh. Of course, there's plenty of information on the interwebs how to do it, yet many contradicting information, and the Mac idiosyncratic hardware doesn't really simplify things.

Ubuntu offers to try the system before installing, and as burning a bootable CD doesn't cause any problems, I had a quite satisfying taste of linux booted off CD. As I didn't want to make a complete switch before knowing I could still use all of images. music and other documents, I wanted to go down the dual boot route, or maybe just having a small linux on an usb stick before loosing all the data on my internal disk, which spoiled my fun with the Macbook I had before.

So far, after some four days of intense hacking, numerous reboot and installation attempts, I only learned some valuable lessons, without yet succeeding in setting up a workable Ubuntu installation. Luckily, I remembered some valuable ideas from my times as professional unix nerd, which so far prevented from losing my music, documents and images I gathered over the last few years/ Phew.

I just finished the second restore of the internal hard disk, so if you go for the adventure of installing Linux on a box that has already some valuable data/setup, here's the first important hint:
Clone your original disk with something Carbon Copy Cloner!

Luckily I had a big external USB with lots of stuff, but still sufficient space available, so before I started doctoring with the single partition of the internal disk, I made a clone that saved my ass already twice. I couldn't resize the disk - it was probably too cluttered after some years of use. To create a second partition, I needed to clone the system, delete all contents, create a second partition, and restore the original system.

I learned heaps of the boot process as well, which differs quite a bit between Apple and PC systems. PCs use traditionally BIOS booting, while my and all newer Macs use a method called EFI. These methods don't mix too well, although its possible to have the Mac emulating a BIOS to install Linux (and Windows as well). I forgot already what a default Ubuntu installation would do, as most description suggest a manual partitioning setup.

Each disk has a Master Boot Record (MBR), which you want to preserve for a dual boot system. I learned the hard way that installing a MBR onto the disk itself doesn't work well. MacOS still started, but appeared a bit sluggish, but more important, I couldn't get Linux to boot. Second highly important hint:
Don't install the MBR onto the disk, but in a dedicated small partition!

While from MacOS 10.7 onwards BootCamp offers a multiboot capability, mainly to run Windows parallel, the best solution seems a tool named rEFIt. I didn't manage to start the installation from USB stick without it, yet with it things started working out fine. That was the tool that enabled me to find out that I screwed up the MBR of my disk - after installing Linux two penguins appeared in the boot menu, none of which swam to the shores of a booting system.

After the second time I reinstalled my Mac from the clone, things started working out really well. I could use the USB stick for installation (less noisy and a bit faster than the CD installation), and finally, I could boot into a working Linux on my Mac. Hooray!

However, there's still plenty of things to sort out. My Linux partition is much smaller than the Mac part, and I want to access the files on the Mac partition (at least in read-only mode) from Linux. Though it's possible to boot Ubuntu with EFI, this needs some more doctoring. Also, the brightness control doesn't work yet. It still looks like I can now start figuring out how useful Ubuntu is while still being able to fall back to the comfort and settings of my Mac.

The aim remains to create a system which offers more privacy than MacOS. Apple has been caught lately with a lot of cooperation with the American spy authorities, and having a system that can't be spied on, and offers more Tor integration makes all the hacking worthwhile.