Enter, my triple-boot operating system configuration: OSX Snow Leopard, Windows 7 x64 and Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. In a way, this is Inception for operating systems with 3 layers.

OSX Boot Camp for Windows 7

First we will dual-boot our MacBook with Windows 7, using a utility called Boot Camp. Most people will be familiar with this, so I will not go into much detail. It is a very easy tool to use; click through all the options, decide how big you want your partition to be and install with the Windows 7 disc. There is a known bug, that you may be prompted to download Windows Support software and then failing to do so. You can ignore this and continue, all the software you need is on the Snow Leopard CD.

I chose a partition size of about 170GB; Windows will have the biggest partition size out of the three as I will be installing games which takes up considerable space. When partitioning, Boot Camp will take a slice from your OSX partition to give to Windows. Bear this in mind, as you will need to leave some space for the Kubuntu slice.

Once the install is complete, you will be able to boot into Windows 7. During the bootup chime, press and hold the Option key to give you the option to boot into Windows. Once Windows 7 loads, insert the Snow Leopard CD and run the Boot Camp software installer. This will install all the drivers you need for things such as the sound card and hardware buttons (volume control etc.). You may also want to go to the NVidia website to download the latest graphics card drivers. You have now successfully completed your dual-boot installation.

Kubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. Triple-boot and GRUB loader

This part is slightly more tricky. You cannot use Boot Camp to do this, as it has already been used for your Windows 7 install and it does not support other operating systems to boot with. So, we shall do a little preparation.

First, you will need to prepare a partition size for Kubuntu. Boot back into OSX to prepare your partition and load up Terminal to use diskutil. To find the disk identifier for your OSX partition, type:

diskutil list

This will give you a list of all the partitions you have. Once done you need to use the following syntax command to resize your OSX partition to give to Kubuntu:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume [disk identifier] [disk size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size]

So an example of how I did it would be: sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 12G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Kubuntu Linux”

You may wonder why I have chosen FAT32 as my partition type; it doesn’t matter what it is. In the guide here, under “Boot Camp & Partitioning”, it indicates “Linux” as a partition type. I could not get this to work so I used FAT32 instead. When you install Kubuntu, it formats it to EXT3 to give it the correct partition type. I gave Kubuntu 12GB which is plenty for the operating system and the swap partition.

Now you are ready to install Kubuntu. I am using the latest release, version 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I prefer KDE instead of Gnome, so I am using Kubuntu in this instance. You can, of course, use Ubuntu if you prefer or any other Linux distribution of your choice. Boot off the Maverick CD and go through the installation, taking care to set your own partition preferences and choosing the partition you just created to install the OS. If you decide you want a swap partition, you can take a small chunk from that during setup.

Once installed, the GRUB boot loader will setup everything for you for multiple operating system boot choices. A thing to note, is that initially the GRUB loader will not properly boot into OSX at the time of writing. I believe extra additional packages need to be installed for this to work, however I did not worry too much as I can still use the Option key to choose OSX at start up.

Now you have successfully completed your triple-boot system!

Additional support for MacBook Pro functionality in Kubuntu

For full functionality, you will want all the hardware to work. It is fairly straight forward, as there are instructions on how to get the hardware buttons to work and the backlit keyboard.

To summarise, you will need the Mactel PPA support tools:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mactel-support && sudo apt-get update

And pommed:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-bl-dkms pommed

And that is pretty much it, I now have Mac OSX to boot into if required, Windows 7 for gaming and Kubuntu which I use for productivity tasks. I actually use Kubuntu the most, and it is very pretty. If you want to know how to enable the Desktop Cube in Kubuntu for said pretty, head on over to Girlygeekdom where I will explain more!