Monadnock: Another Schizo Attempt
In case you couldn’t tell, Ticonderoga and Monadnock are the host names of my computers. Good, strong New England names.
Anyway, I was so pleased with Ticonderoga’s transformation into a dual-boot development machine, that I decided to do the same with Monadnock. Except, I decided that I would also try to load Windows XP natively on it as well. My inspiration for such shenanigans came from this post at Anomalous Anomaly.
To make a long story short, I failed. Windows struck again, though the Kubuntu distro also tripped me up a bit. What I do have at the moment is a dual-boot system with OS X and Kubuntu on it and a 20 GB hole between the disk partitions where the WindowXP install was going to go.
The issue was the lack of gparted with the Kubuntu distro. Since gparted is a Gnome-based application and Kubuntu is a KDE-based distro, gparted was not included on the LiveCD I burned. The other included disk partitioning tools did not include support for the NTFS filesystem and it did not seem to be able to read GPT disk formatting information. So, from this point on, I deviated from the Anomalous instructions and went my own way.
Rebooting to the Kubuntu CD, I ran the Linux installation procedure, which includes a good partitioning program. From there, I blew away the 70GB FAT32 partition that Apple’s Boot Camp had installed and replaced it with a 20GB FAT32 partition and a 50GB ext3 Linux partition. I then continued the Kubuntu Linux installation onto the ext3 partition, also making sure that GRUB, the Linux bootloader, was installed in the ext3 partition and not at the base of the GPT/MBR hybrid partitioning scheme. That might have caused problems with the Windows XP install.
The Kubuntu Linux installation was successful, though it doesn’t have full support for the MacBook Pro out of the box. I had to install some extra device drivers and do some extra configuration in order to get the special function keys and the special trackpad features to work. Or, at least I tried. Some things worked, but even those only worked temporarily.
No matter, I could attend to those later. Now it was time to install Windows XP. I fired up Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant and hit the second snag: Boot Camp froze. Evidently, it didn’t my hand-rolled partitioning scheme and just sat there, dormant. I killed the process and then tried to just install from the Windows XP installation CD. No luck there either. The Windows XP installation process failed with a missing file error.
A missing file error? On an operating system installation CD? Excellent work there, Microsoft.
So, no Windows “joy” on my laptop, which is just as well. When I told a colleague at work about my triple booting plans, his response when I mentioned a Windows installation was, “Why would you want to take a huge dump on your hard drive?”
Well, writing cross-platform code means support Windows as well, no matter how odious the environment. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to scrounge up a Windows-only development box.
In the meantime, I’ll have to trash the 20GB partition hole and reuse the space. I’ll probably expand the Linux file system to fill in the space.
Or maybe use it for other operating systems like PC-BSD or some such.