Today I tried to install Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 Desktop Edition 64bit on my Macbook Pro 4.1 next to Mac OSX 10.5.6 Leopard and had to overcome some obstacles which I want to document here.

First I tried to use the Bootcamp Assistant to resize my existing Mac OSX partition, but I got an error about some files that couldn’t be moved. To solve this, I first tried to free up more space and delete big files, but this didn’t help. Next thing I tried was to run iDefrag, but after 5 hours it didn’t seem to make much progress, so I stopped it and reverted to Carbon Copy Cloner. After completing the following steps, Bootcamp Assistant managed to resize the partition:

• Backup the internal disk to an external USB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)
• Reboot and boot from the external USB disk (hold ‘option’ or ‘alt’ during boot)
• Open Disk Utility and erase the internal hard disk
• Restore the external USB disk to the internal disk again (don’t select the ‘erase destination checkbox)
• Reboot and boot from the internal disk (hold ‘option’ or ‘alt’ during boot)
• Run Bootcamp Assistant and partition your disk

After finally having space available for Ubuntu, I downloaded and installed rEFIt, an EFI boot loader. We will need this to repair the MBR after installing Ubuntu.

Now reboot and install Ubuntu as you usually would do, just be careful while partitioning the disk.
After the Ubuntu installation has completed, reboot and select the partition tool in the rEFIt menu. It will prompt you to repair the MBR, answer this with yes. You have to do this step, otherwise the normal Apple boot menu, which appears when you hold down ‘option’ during boot, won’t see the Linux partition (which it labels as Windows).

You should now be able to select either ‘rEFIt’ or ‘Windows’ in the Apple boot menu, while ‘Windows’ really is our Ubuntu installation.
You can leave it as this now, or remove rEFIt again (this is what I did) and use the normal Apple boot menu to switch between Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

To get the most out of my Macbook Pro, I followed the steps listed here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro4-1/Intrepid

One thing that didn’t work after the above was the wireless network through. The trick was to add ‘wl’ to /etc/modules and do a reboot, otherwise the wireless network card wouldn’t show up.

Beside those initial hassels, Intrepid seems to work really well on the Macbook Pro. Suspend and 3D acceleration seems to work great and everything es very snappy. But I haven’t tested much yet.