HOWTO: Install Ubuntu on a MacBook and use GRUB to boot.

[Entity]

We will delete Mac OS X as we don't use it often enough and install Ubuntu its partitions in order to take advantage of the entire disk's space. This is not a multi boot setup.

You will be able to boot Mac OS X and/or Windows XP from an external hard drive (with a GUID Partition Table) in order to update your hardware firmwares, etc. (Not covered here for the moment)

You will need :

- MacBook Mac OS X Install Disc 1 (Might not be necessary after all, see hereunder for more details)
- Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (aka Dapper Drake)
- The MacBook itself (duh!)
- A patched version of the GRUB boot loader (provided here)

***

1) First you will boot using the MacBook Mac OS X Install Disc 1. Press C on system startup.

You will then launch the Disk Utility and select you hard drive. You will click on the Options button and change GPT (GUID Partition Table) to the MS-DOS partition table. We save the change (We don't care about the partition setup for now, the default is OK).

Update: This first step might not be mandatory as you can convert the partition table to MD-DOS type from gparted using the Ubuntu Dapper Drake LiveCD. It would need to be tested. If it doesn't work restart from step #1.

2) Restart the computer and now you will boot using the Ubuntu LiveCD. Press C on system startup.

In Ubuntu, simply launch the Installer as you would do in a normal installation. Partition your drive as you wish and there is no need to keep your HFS volume.

Since we change the partition table to an ms-dos type we won't get any error and the installation process will complete normaly (GREAT!)

3) When finished, set the active partition. You can use parted :

sudo parted

print (no flag?)
set (enter the partition number)
boot
on
print (check the boot flag!)
quit

4) Now you need to install the patched version of GRUB or else the boot process will hang on stage2. Let's chroot our root partition.

sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ubuntu/
sudo mount -t proc none /mnt/ubuntu/proc
sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/ubuntu/dev
sudo chroot /mnt/ubuntu

Now install the package after unzipping it.

unzip grub_0.97-1ubuntu10_i386.zip
dpkg -i grub_0.97-1ubuntu10_i386.deb

Just to be sure...

grub-install /dev/sda

Voilà! You can now restart the computer and wait for GRUB to do its job. The only difference you will note, is that you will not see the apple logo on startup anymore but a folder with a question mark instead. I would love to replace it by the Ubuntu logo!

FYI, I guess it would be possible to install Mac OS X on an external drive that has a GPT partition table but I can't test it tonight!

Also note, the patch was taken from there. And I applied this patch to the package myself using the Ubuntu source package and this simple but great howto. It was my first time doing so! Use at your own risk.