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Booksley wrote:

Or do you have a PowerPC?

iBook G4 1.33Ghz

Booksley wrote:

3) Why did you format your *nix partitions as HFS+? There's no HFS+ driver for *nix.

I originally formatted them as such since I didn't know how long it would be before I put Linux on them.  I can use them with the Mac OS until I do so, and they can easily be removed and replaced in *nix.

As for why the changed ones are currently listed as HFS+ by Disk Utility, I don't know.  They weren't formatted like that.

There are HFS+ drivers.  I had had them working read only at one point, but never got write to work.  That was with an older version of Ubuntu and not installed standard.  I'm not sure how it is currently.

I think you need to back-up your home folder and nuke your drive to get this all sorted out.

That's not what I was hoping for.  But if I must, I must.  I'll have to wait a bit for that.    Things are working fine for now.

You can get newer versions of PPC Ubuntu here.

Nice.  I'll have to try those.  How come they aren't listed in the normal mirrors?

Wouldn't it be just so much easier to run Linux in a virtual Machine?
Q is based on QEMU, runs on PPC macs, will emulate x86 processors, is compatible with 10.3 through 10.5, and is FREE.

Last edited by FutureDreamz (2008-05-07 6:29 pm)

Booksley wrote:

For future partioning efforts, the best way to handle the possibility of other OSes is to carve out a chunk of space at the end of the drive, without formatting it as a filesystem. That way you have a contiguous chunk that the installer can format as it pleases.

I want to format as I please though:  I want to do some other OS installs there.  I've never had a problem before replacing a partition.

I found a recent thread on the Ubuntu forums regarding the HFS+ driver. From what they said, I wouldn't trust it, honestly. You need to disable journaling and writing can possibly corrupt files.

Disappointing.  I had worse luck getting Linux to read Disk Utility's UFS format at all.  I want some file pathway between Mac and Linux.  The read support for HFS+ worked just fine for me though, and that's good enough for one way.

As for Ubuntu PPC, official support from Canonical (Ubuntu's commercial sponsor) was dropped in 6.06; all releases past that are community-supported only. To be honest, it really doesn't change much, as the best place for help/support is the Ubuntu forums.

Ah I see.  Good that it is still supported then.

FutureDreamz wrote:

Wouldn't it be just so much easier to run Linux in a virtual Machine?
Q is based on QEMU, runs on PPC macs, will emulate x86 processors, is compatible with 10.3 through 10.5, and is FREE.

I dunno.  Looks interesting, but more to learn, and the website isn't very helpful.  And no emulation needed for Linux.  Can that emulate older PPC and 68k machines?

cosmicosmo wrote:

Booksley wrote:

For future partioning efforts, the best way to handle the possibility of other OSes is to carve out a chunk of space at the end of the drive, without formatting it as a filesystem. That way you have a contiguous chunk that the installer can format as it pleases.

I want to format as I please though:  I want to do some other OS installs there.  I've never had a problem before replacing a partition.

I found a recent thread on the Ubuntu forums regarding the HFS+ driver. From what they said, I wouldn't trust it, honestly. You need to disable journaling and writing can possibly corrupt files.

Disappointing.  I had worse luck getting Linux to read Disk Utility's UFS format at all.  I want some file pathway between Mac and Linux.  The read support for HFS+ worked just fine for me though, and that's good enough for one way.

Doing your own partitioning is fine. But there are several advantages to partitioning the first partition as your OS X partition:
1) You'll be able to install/reinstall/nuke the other OSes without affecting OS X
2) The OS X partition can be shrunk/expanded as you see fit
Of course, this is assuming that OS X is your main OS. Installing your main OS as the first partition is the ideal way to handle things.

In my experience, the best way to handle sharing drives between Linux and OS X is... NTFS. Yes, the best way to handle sharing between the two is to use Microsoft's filesystem NTFS-3G is the most mature filesystem available for both OSes. Of course, FAT32 would be ideal, but it's lack of support for files over 4GB in size can cause problems... But if you don't expect to use any files over 4GB, then FAT32 would also work fine (known as VFAT in *nix)

Booksley wrote:

[…Doing your own partitioning is fine. But there are several advantages to partitioning the first partition as your OS X partition:
1) You'll be able to install/reinstall/nuke the other OSes without affecting OS X
2) The OS X partition can be shrunk/expanded as you see fit
Of course, this is assuming that OS X is your main OS. Installing your main OS as the first partition is the ideal way to handle things.

I did have OS X on the first partition (disk0s9 after all Apple driver partitions).  It was the linux gparted that seemed to mess that up. 

I agree, primary drive should be first.

In my experience, the best way to handle sharing drives between Linux and OS X is... NTFS. Yes, the best way to handle sharing between the two is to use Microsoft's filesystem NTFS-3G is the most mature filesystem available for both OSes. Of course, FAT32 would be ideal, but it's lack of support for files over 4GB in size can cause problems... But if you don't expect to use any files over 4GB, then FAT32 would also work fine (known as VFAT in *nix)

I just noticed that Leopard's Disk Utility allows me to create an Ext2 partition, at least on an external drive.  Does this mean Leopard can read Ext2?  Write?  If so, then that would be the way to go.  I'm thinking of reformatting the end of the drive Ext2 just to see what happens.

Also, what happened to the UFS that was there with Tiger and before?

cosmicosmo wrote:

I just noticed that Leopard's Disk Utility allows me to create an Ext2 partition, at least on an external drive.  Does this mean Leopard can read Ext2?  Write?  If so, then that would be the way to go.  I'm thinking of reformatting the end of the drive Ext2 just to see what happens.

Also, what happened to the UFS that was there with Tiger and before?

I just tried it.  Mac OS X can both read from and write to it.  I haven't tried it with Linux yet to make sure it is proper ext2.  I'll also have to see if OS X will recognize drives formatted ext2 by Linux.  This is promising.  I'll just use ext2 instead of ext3 if this works.

You can create an Ext2 partition?
diskutil says Valid filesystems: "Journaled HFS+" "HFS+" "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS FAT32" "MS-DOS FAT12" "MS-DOS" "NTFS-3G" "UDF" "UFS" "ZFS"

Hmm, it appears that I have ext2fsx installed.  I didn't install it with Leopard, but I could well have on a previous version and it stayed when I installed Leopard.  Anyway, that seems to work perfectly fine for ext2 drives created with Drive Utility.  I'll have to see how it works with Linux.

Ah, that would explain it...

I know that the ability to non-destructively repartition HFS+ only came in with 10.4/5. Perhaps the ext2fsx driver doesn't support the ability to repartition like that?