An excellent guide on managing the Ubuntu swap.

This is what I did with 512MB RAM memory. Recommended in the guide is to set swap size to double the system RAM.

Add a swap file and temporarily add it to the running system
cat /proc/meminfo
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/1040Mb.swap bs=1M count=1040
sudo mkswap /mnt/1040Mb.swap
sudo swapon /mnt/1040Mb.swap
cat /proc/meminfo

Make the new swap file permanent
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
/mnt/1040Mb.swap  none  swap  sw  0 0

..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.

Below is a nice how-to guide on how to create a triple boot set-up on the Macbook. The tutorial uses a manual install of rEFIt but I used the guided version described on the rEFIt homepage.