I am typing this on a Macbook Pro that is reliably triple booting Mac OSX, Ubuntu, and Vista. It took me nearly a dozen install attempts to get (almost) everything to work. I say almost because the only thing that doesn't work at this point is the wireless card under Ubuntu. These are the key learnings:
1) There are several tutorials out there on how to do this install, but none of them work completely. I had to pick and choose bits and pieces from several to get something that worked and worked repeatedly. 2) I could not get GRUB to work reliably, no matter how many times I tried. Something about the keyboard driver prevented me from scrolling down the list (I could only scroll with a USB keyboard attached). I really wanted to use GRUB, but in the end went back to LILO, which has consistently worked fine. 3) Every time OSX or Ubuntu does a system or firmware level update it breaks my Vista boot capability. When this happens I insert the Vista disk, and select it from refit. The keyboard doesn't work at this point, so I have to use a USB keyboard to click Enter to get into setup on the Vista disk. Once there, just click Repair and Vista fixes the problem. After that it will boot normally into Vista, until the next update screws with the hardware/boot partition. This has happened about once a week or so the past month. It's a little annoying, but I just carry the Vista disk around with me and it hasn't been a problem. 4) The Atheros wifi card does not have a linux driver. Madwifi is coming out with one, but no date is known. Doing the ndiswrapper approach you'll read about on a bunch of blogs and forums only ends up locking up my system (if you use the DLink driver) or failing to install (if you use the newest Lenovo driver). I think it will work with an older Lenovo driver, but I don't have it and couldn't find it. When I want to use wireless I use OSX or Vista, and am living without wireless in Ubuntu until Feisty fixes this for me (the card is supposed to be supported). 5) I could not compile and install a new Kernel that LILO would boot into. It is probably my own ignorance, but I gave up after a few failed attempts and reinstalls. 6) You only need Bootcamp for the driver disk. Use Mac OSX diskutil to make the partitions and then install Refit. Refit is an amazing tool, and works very well. Once you have your partitions, you can try various install of Windows and Linux without messing up Refit or the OSX partition. OSX and Refit always worked throughout my attempts. It's comforting to see something work when nothing else does. 7) As you read through the instructions in various tutorials about how to chroot from the Ubuntu Live CD, hang on to them! You will end up doing that procedure several times to make changes to your Ubuntu install when you need to boot from the Live CD. Once I figured this out, it made life a lot easier during my attempts to get GRUB to work and to upgrade my Kernel. LILO has been reliable, but I understand that a kernel upgrade will require me to fix LILO as well (this hasn't happened yet, but knowing the chroot steps make it a trivial fix). The chroot code I'm referring to looks something like this: sudo su - mkdir /mnt/ubuntu mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/ubuntu mount -t proc none /mnt/ubuntu/proc mount -o bind /dev /mnt/ubuntu/dev chroot /mnt/ubuntu /bin/bash You'll need to type all that each time you want to access your Ubuntu partition from a Live CD boot 8 ) Be careful when using tutorials that are for Macbooks. They have different hardware, and several ideas (like right clicking, wifi, and so on) didn't work with my Macbook Pro. Same goes for comments on forums and blogs. I tried a lot of things that didn't work because I didn't pay attention to this. 9) I couldn't get Feisty Herd 5 to work, so I am using Edgy. Hopefully the final release of Feisty will work, because it has some nice hardware support for the Atheros wifi card, and the mac keyboard and touchpad. 10) If you are used to Windows, you will find the lack of right click annoying. There are a bunch of solutions, but the only one I could get to work reliably was: xmodmap -e 'keycode 116 = Pointer_Button2' xmodmap -e 'keycode 108 = Pointer_Button3' xkbset m This sets you little enter key to be the right click, and the right Apple key to be the middle click. You have to install xkbset for this to work. I use it in a shell script that runs at startup (add it under Preferences->Sessions->Startup). 11) In addition to external USB keyboard, I can't recommend a USB mouse highly enough. I never had the mouse lock up, but being able to easily right click when setting up Vista and Ubuntu made life a lot easier. You can get by without one, but if you have one, use it. I used a wireless Microsoft Notebook Mouse and it worked flawlessly in all 3 OSes throughout all of my attempts. Pretty amazing, that.
That's pretty much it. Vista looks great and runs very well on this machine. I haven't installed Beryl/Compiz (after all the work it took to get this up and running, I'm sticking to using it for now, I've had a lot of problems with Beryl on my other PC, and don't want to mess this up), but have read that it can be installed and works well. Please post your experiences if you try it.
In my next post I'll post a tutorial of the things that worked for me.
Hope this helps someone!