Introduction

Ubuntu is a sexy operating system and one of its big advantages on OS X is that you can deploy functionalities on demand, I mean without using your credit card each time you want to try a new program or add a service. I'll not pretend it's as polished as osX in terms of hardware support, but that's the problem of hardware providers. They prefer save 500000$/year than to pay a team of developers to support more platforms. That might change in the future.

This howto has been tested on a powerbook 17", 800MHz with 768Mb of SDRAM. OS X was fully occupying the 80GB hard disk so it was necessary to first repartition the hard disk to get some space.

There are some tools existing to do this on OS X but you have to pay for a software you will use very few times, this sound insane and there is an alternative. Also you can't resize a mounted partition. One solution would be to use a firewire hard disk to boot from it and do the resizing of the internal hard disk, another solution is to use an install cd of ubuntu and the command line tool parted which will kindly and smoothly do the job.

I haven't chosen to install Gutsy, just because my experiences with Gutsy have just been too bad with other machines as Feisty is still less than one year old and very stabilised. Debian could have been another choice, but Debian release cycle has the same duration as Microsoft, by the way with a far much better result, but that's another story.

Getting the Ubuntu Alternate CD

For some reason, the Desktop Live CD was booting, lauching X but Gnome Desktop never appeared, so I proceeded with the Alternate CD.
Step 1: Get the alternate CD : http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/7.04/release/ubuntu-7.04-altern...
Step 2 : Verify that the md5 sum is valid with :
md5sum path_to_your_iso_image
You must obtain f3a86f0f34e6c4368cb4a7b5e6131113
Step 3 : Burn the iso image with gnomebaker (Tools - Burn CD iso) if you are already on a linux box or with your favorite tool on OS X

Be sure to not print the iso on the CD like you would print an mp3 but to burn from iso, otherwise your computer will never boot from the CD

Disabling Filesystem journaling on OS X

In the OS X utilities launch the Terminal and type :

cd /Volumes
ls

This will give you the name of your hard disk. Then proceed

sudo diskutil disableJournal Macintosh\ HD/

Once everything is finished you will have to enable the journaling again with

sudo diskutil enableJournal Macintosh\ HD/


Resizing your hard drive

Reboot on the CD. To do this, hold the 'c' key during starting until you see some unusual data printed on screen. On MacIntel, this might be the 'd' key.
At the prompt press Enter and follow the install process until partitioning. Don't proceed partioning but Go Back and start a Shell.
In the shell launch the GNU parted application with

parted

Then launch the command

unit kb print

You must retain the first 2 figures. The first one is the partion number, and the second one, where the partition is starting.
Then use the resize command :

resize partition_number starting_position New_size

For example :

resize 10 138,5kb 35000000kb

The process will take about 45 minutes.
Once this is done you can quit parted and continue your install.

Partionning

I advise you to first use the option to partition the largest available space and then proceed modifs. Basically, you want to have

/
/home
swap


The automatic tools create a special partition and that's why you have to use it, because usually a Linux install doesn't need that supplementary partition.

Here will follow the install and setup

You can setup ctrl+click = right click by editing /etc/default/mouseemu and uncommenting out the lines:

MID_CLICK="-middle 125 272"
RIGHT_CLICK="-right 29 272"

and then:

$sudo /etc/init.d/mouseemu restart