Installing/Booting Ubuntu on External Drive w/ Macbook Pro - Mac-Forums.com

Corbab · 10-30-2009, 12:07 PM

**I'm not exactly sure if this is the proper forum for this post, so please don't judge me too harshly if it's not**

I've been using Macs for about 4-5 years now and absolutely love them. I've used them for fairly basic things so far (photos, web browsing, etc...), but I'm interested in going further. I was hoping to be able to run Linux on my machine (13" Macbook Pro), but I don't want to take up space on my internal disk or partition that disk. I have an external drive that I was hoping to partition and install Ubuntu on, using the other partition for general storage/backup. I was wondering if this is possible and what might be the best way of going about it. For instance: Will I be able to boot from a partition on an external drive at all?

P.S. I'm running 10.6.1. Figure that might be important...

Any help is very much appreciated.

SammySlim · 10-30-2009, 01:11 PM

You should consider running Linux in a virtual machine, using Fusion, Parallels or VirtualBox. No partition needed. Probably simpler than mucking about with booting from an external drive - Linux takes up very little space as an OS, and you can still use your external drive for file storage.

Cheers

Corbab · 10-30-2009, 01:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SammySlim

You should consider running Linux in a virtual machine, using Fusion, Parallels or VirtualBox. No partition needed. Probably simpler than mucking about with booting from an external drive - Linux takes up very little space as an OS, and you can still use your external drive for file storage.

Cheers

Thanks for the help. Just wondering, would using BootCamp be a viable option/worth the hassle of having to reformat my hard drive?

deus_ex_machina · 10-30-2009, 02:34 PM

I wouldn't bother. Which distro are you wanting to run? Like already said, they don't take up much space.

chscag · 10-30-2009, 02:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corbab

Thanks for the help. Just wondering, would using BootCamp be a viable option/worth the hassle of having to reformat my hard drive?

That would be a lot of trouble to go through and you would wind up having to use a boot manager for EFI such as "rEFIt". BC is designed to work with the Windows type boot sector.

Also, you can't use Boot Camp to partition an external hard drive, so that option is out. And as far as setting up Ubuntu on an external drive, while it certainly is possible, it's just not worth the trouble. Sammy gave you the best solution. Using Ubuntu in a VM is very easy to setup and run. VirtualBox is free and will run Ubuntu very nicely.

Regards.