External Hard Driv & Multiple OSes

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tux08902

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I volunteer my time for the Gentoo-Alt project, so I need to be able to use FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, and other Unices other than OS X. I have Windows Vista dual-booting on my MacBook Pro. If I were to install Gentoo Linux on an external firewire hard drive, would I be able to boot from it on my MacBook Pro, without having to use additional tools like rEFIt? That's the biggest turn off, otherwise, I'd triple-boot directly on this MacBook Pro.
 
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tux08902 said:
I volunteer my time for the Gentoo-Alt project, so I need to be able to use FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, and other Unices other than OS X. I have Windows Vista dual-booting on my MacBook Pro. If I were to install Gentoo Linux on an external firewire hard drive, would I be able to boot from it on my MacBook Pro, without having to use additional tools like rEFIt? That's the biggest turn off, otherwise, I'd triple-boot directly on this MacBook Pro.
Click to expand...

Have you considered VMWare Fusion? I would recommend Parallels, but their VM toolkit for Unices is weak.
 
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tux08902

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I have Parallels installed, but I won't be able to use it as effectively until I get 4GB of RAM. Is what I detailed even possible? Can I even run Compiz or KDE 4 in Parallels with all the graphics turned up?
 
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tux08902 said:
I have Parallels installed, but I won't be able to use it as effectively until I get 4GB of RAM. Is what I detailed even possible? Can I even run Compiz or KDE 4 in Parallels with all the graphics turned up?
Click to expand...

I haven't been able to get Beryl/Compiz to run in Parallels, but I understand that Fusion has better 3D support in some situations. The nice thing about running different Linux distros in VMs is that you don't have to fuss with bootloaders and make major modifications to your disk structure each time you need to make a change. I'll take that flexibility over eye candy any day.
 
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tux08902

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Thanks, I understand, but it would it even be possible to do what I said in the first post, you know booting from an external hard drive?
 
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Macs from the PPC to current as far as I know, can boot from firewire external drives be them hard or optical, PPC ones cannot boot from USB however Intel ones can also.
 
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tux08902

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Ok, that's good news. Can the firmware bootloader boot Linux from a firewire hard drive? I know that Linux can boot from anything, so on that side it's all fine. It's the Mac side I'm worried about.
 
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tux08902 said:
Ok, that's good news. Can the firmware bootloader boot Linux from a firewire hard drive? I know that Linux can boot from anything, so on that side it's all fine. It's the Mac side I'm worried about.
Click to expand...
I don't know if it can boot linux, but I'm sure it can boot off of usb external drives...

Try installing linux onto an external drive and booting it...
 

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