..continuing the previous post.

After running Mac OS X, Windows XP and Ubuntu for a while, all on my MyBook, I’m quite confident I’ve found the best set-up for myself.

I have installed rEFIt for triple boot, which works fine by the way, for my three different partitions. Mac OS partition is default of course, Windows XP is on a Bootcamp-made partition and I created the third partition through Disk Utility. Even after this effort it turns out this is not how I’m using my system. An interesting finding is that I can re-install Mac OS, Windows and Ubuntu independently from each other without screwing up the system or boot stability.

The most efficient solution for me is to always boot the Mac OS system and run Windows and Ubuntu through virtual machines. Mac OS is incredibly stable and always running on this system leverages the MacBook hardware in the most optimal way. By hardware I mean battery life, mouse/trackpad, not needing to shut down the system and so on.

For virtual machines I been reading up on vmWare, Virtual Box and Parallels. To my understanding they are fairly equal in features and performance and I selected vmWare as my first try. This worked out so well I never bothered to test the other two.

A few things to note is
- I followed a guide to get vmWare to boot the stand-alone Ubuntu partition, which does not work out-of-the-box. To use the guide I created a ‘empty’ virtual Ubuntu system that I modified.
- 3D rendering (Compiz) is not working in Ubuntu. 3D support is only for Win XP and Vista.
- Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is working fine, Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) is not mounting my network shares in a reliable way (not related to vmWare) and the test version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is working fine.
- By default Ubuntu is configuring the mouse to be ‘vmmouse’ when running vmWare which is not working reliably (for me). I needed to find a way to disable/switch the system to ‘mouse’ driver to get good stability. This is done slightly different in the different releases and I googled the solutions.

The really nice thing is that I can install and re-install any OS in no time through vmWare, which lets me test for example the new Ubuntu release without any hassle.

If I would re-do my set-up today I would have my Mac OS, make a bootcamp partition for Windows (to be able to get all system resources on Windows if I need to) and run the Ubuntu system only through vmWare (on a virtual partition and not a stand-alone partition).

Good luck!

(see the next post)

I wanted to have a Linux OS to play around with. After some brief reading up it looks like there is a good chance of getting this going -and it was. I now have a fairly well working install

Boot management is under control with rEFIt (linked in previous post)

A good starting point is the Macbook compatibility guide.

This post get me on track with keyboard backlight and trackpad tapping.

Brightness control is fixed in the end of this thread.

- Since OS X is not mounting EXT3 discs in a solid way I still have no access to the Ubuntu system through VMware. I have not tried to run the Ubuntu install through the VMware system.

- I have no sound yet.

..to be continued.

I tested the early alpha releases which had some interesting changes. However a bit too unstable for me. It is getting closer now to the real release of the next version. Looking forward to it..

UPDATE:
The Airport Extreme runs multiple USB discs through a USB hub without any problems when I use a POWERED USB 2.0 hub. The discs are formatted HFS+ and I have no size restrictions in my transfers.

Finally.

/

UPDATE:
I have found the root cause of the instability on my set-up. Summarizing the set-up is:
Airport Extreme base station
USB hub
2 USB discs connected to the Airport Extreme via the hub
1 printer also connected to the hub

So; the problem is the USB hub.

When connecting the USB directly to the Airport Extreme base station all file copies works.

Next; is to test with a more efficient USB hub, maybe with separate power supply.

—————————————–

So.. after a lot of hassle the disc is working ok. I have 2 USB discs connected to an Airport Extreme (see earlier post as well). I’ve had file closing or input-output errors and I’ve been unable to update ID3 tags through Amarok.

The ID3 tags is still somewhat unstable. The situation is ok now running a stable release of Hardy Heron and mounting through standard CIFS with iocharset=utf8 in FSTAB. The connections seems sensitive but work most of the time if I’m not stressing the disc with other tasks.

This is a great post on fixing the shut-down timeout problem that occurs with CIFS discs.