ubercharged.net

Currently I’m running Team Fortress 2 on a MacBook Pro dual booting between Windows and OS X using boot camp. Now I’m on a glorious mission to add Ubuntu into the mix for a triple boot setup.

Its entirely possible that I’ll balls the whole thing up and end up with a MacBrick for a few days till I get it sorted. So if I suddenly go AWOL, and am not playing TF2, and don’t respond to emails, thats why (not that much different to normal really…)

I was kinda happy with the setup I had using Mac OS X for development work and Windows for gaming and pissing around cross platform testing. Anyway, then I got shifted over to a Ruby on Rails project (which is a bit more interesting than the back end Java development work I was doing), and I need to run against Oracle. Which Mac hates. So I need to boot into Ubuntu to get any work done. Man, this stuff shouldn’t be this hard.

Update
It all went quite smoothly in the end. Only lost one business day to getting it all set up (I was expecting way worse). The only gotcha I encountered was resizing the OS X partition to create the Windows and Linux partitions. Diskutil in OS X lets you resize partitions dynamically without splatting the current drive contents, but it doesn’t play so nice when you’ve been using the partition for a while and you’ve already got fragmented data all the way up into the areas that the new partitions will require.

I bought a copy of iDefrag, and ran the off line compaction operation. That cleared it all right up.

From there, the guides on Installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro and Triple Boot via BootCamp Ubuntu were invaluable.

After that it was another day or so getting the Ubuntu environment set up for development (installing Ruby, Rails, Oracle, NetBeans etc), and I was good to go with a nice triple boot system.