Can You Install Linux on Mac HFS+ Filesystems?

Stu asks: "I've been thinking about giving my faithful old PowerMac 7600/120 a little boost, and also thought it would be nice to give Linux a go, especially to try out the GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop. I've noticed over the past year or so quite a lot of distibutions have popped up which install in an MSDOS partition and can be launched from within Win95/98 or MSDOS, like WinLinux and many others. I'm shying away from repartitioning my HD and installing LinuxPPC as of now, but I'd like to kinda dip my toes in the water before I take the full plunge, so my question is: Does anything similar to WinLinux and those other distros exist for the PowerPC platform, i.e. can install in an HFS+ partition alongside MacOS?"

Darwin does it - that's BSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin/Mac OS X uses HFS+ for a psuedo-UNIX environment, does it not? Darwin is BSD running under Mach. Perhaps you could get {Net|Open}BSD's userland stuff to run with Darwin? Okay, that would probably require some hackery.

Re:HFS

[Etyenne]

Also, I read something I vaguely remember on /. before about the ability to make an exact replica of a disk image of a Macintosh over a network, very very easily. Anyone have any pointers?

I am not a guru, so feel free to correct me if wrong, but here is what I would do ...

Boot your PPC with a Linux install floppy with network support (I'll investigate single-floppy distros). From then on, mount your HFS partition read-only (no man nearby, don't remember the syntax). Mount an NFS share on a nearby Linux box read-write. Try something like :

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mount/point/to/nfs/share/disk.clone

You might need to enter a bs=somesize. Investigate and read the man page for dd.

My question to the guru : will it work ??? I wanted to try that for a time, but never get enough time on my hand for it. Could restore be as easy as dd if=/mount/point/to/nfs/share/disk-clone of=/dev/sda1 ? If yes, we have something here that render Norton Ghost useless ...

Linux and HFS+

[ikekrull]

I haven't seen any linux distro that can boot and run out of a an HFS partition, but the LinuxPPC install i have on my girlfriend's iMac runs pretty sweet (though i had to fight tooth and nail to install it, but thats another story).

I would just back up my files (never a bad idea), bite the bullet, and repartition. This isn't what you want to hear, but i'm afraid there probably aren't enough mac/linux developers who would want to do what you want badly enough to write the required software, unless you're prepared to do the work yourself.

Install RedHat on Virtual PC

[gfilion]

Okay, I know it sounds very dumb, but it works! You can allow how much you want to Virtual PC and run RedHat linux inside Mac OS.

But I'm pretty sure this ain't gonna give your Mac a boost...

GFK's

only HFS

[arska]

Hello

The only partition I managed to mount under linux was the HFS, the HFS+ didn't work..
BUT: why do you want to install linux on HFS ???
just partition the HD 50/50 ext2 and HFS (or 5/45/30/20 swap/ext2/hfs/hfs+ so you have some macOS place and a 'shared' place..

I just got a 8600/250 (4GB HD), and i'm going to try something like this.. when I get CDs or the bigger pipe for d/l (cable next month :-)
but i'm still not sure about which distro (living in denmark): LinuxPPC or SUSE PPC ??
Some advice appreciated..

Greez,
Aarno

Re:Install RedHat on Virtual PC

[spectatorion]

Will this definitely work? I think VPC is a little different than standard ix86. I know that NetBSD has a specific project (outside of the ix86 port) to run it on VPC, but I'm not sure what the Linux situation is. It may need some tweaking; I would be interested to know if anyone had tried this & what their experience is.

-----
# cd /

No, probably not.

[apm]

HFS+ does have the capability to run multi-user OS's like Linux. It can store ownership and permission information, which Mac OS X uses, although Mac OS 9 ignores this info. IIRC, there isn't the same support for symbolic links as there is under ext2, however. OS X had to come up with some crazy kludge, I think.

But the fact is, HFS+ is not supported by Linux at all right now beyond the very early experimental stages. If you can't even read files off of HFS+, I doubt you'd want to put your root partition there.

That sort of thing is a long way off. Personally, I'd be interested in seeing support for UFS (Apple's Unix File System) under Linux, so you could install Mac OS X and Linux on the same partition. Of course, you'd need to come up with something to avoid conflicting names, e.g. /etc, /usr, and so on. But that seems possible, anyway.

Get another hard drive?

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

What's stopping you from buying another SCSI hard drive for your Mac? One-, two-, and four-gigabyte SCSI disks are very cheap these days and more than large enough to host a useful Unix installation.

This is what I did on my Alpha for a long time (NT and Linux on separate disks), and what I do on my Integraph workstation today (W2K and FreeBSD).

If you want a 1-GB drive, I think I have a spare I can send you for the low, low price of $20 plus s/h. You should be able to find them on your own for cheaper than that.

Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16

HFS

[_outcat_]

In my experience, it's only been HFS. I haven't even been able to pin down the behavior of *that*--my iMac DV, 400mHz, which was pure HFS (MacOS 9--it shipped hfs+ but I razed it down and made it HFS to obey my evil schemes) choked quite badly on some Debian PPC that I and my boyfriend tried to install.

I'm not sure. I'd really like to hear that HFS+ is okay for what you're trying to do. It'd make Linux feasible on my laptop and a few other Macs I have sitting around--they're HFS+, and I have apps on them that I no longer have the media for, and AFAIK there's nothing similar to Partition Magic for Macintosh--I'd have to reformat and install in HFS to install anything.

Anyone know of any Partition Magic -- FIPS type things for MacOS? I'd love it.

Also, I read something I vaguely remember on /. before about the ability to make an exact replica of a disk image of a Macintosh over a network, very very easily. Anyone have any pointers?

Re:HFS

[Smitty825]

Also, I read something I vaguely remember on /. before about the ability to make an exact replica of a disk image of a Macintosh over a network, very very easily. Anyone have any pointers?

A good way to do this would be to use the chooser to mount the remote hard drive you want to save the disk image to, then use the program Disk Copy that ships on all MacOS's since like 7.5 or something like that. Just follow the simple instructions, and make sure to save it to the network drive, and you're all set!