My triple booting development workhorse - How I got Vista Ultimate, OS X and Suse 10.2 to play nice together.

Well it's been almost three months since my last post so I figure It's about time I show everyone what I have been working on. I have been following the progress of OSX86 for some time and decided it was time to get my laptop triple booting the top operating systems. Since I have been beta testing vista I chose to put it in the first partition of my first drive. For those of you not familiar with my laptop specs it is a HP Pavillion DV8030EA with a 2.8 Ghz Turion 64 bit processor, 2 100 gig hardrives, 1 gig of Ram, an ATI Radeon Xpress 200m pcie video card and onboard HD sound, wifi and bluetooth all on a 17 inch widescreen display at 1400x900 resolution. I chose to confine Vista to 50 gig, so I made the partition for Vista, the Hp Quickplay utility and OS X with the Windows disk manager, leaving 20 gig of free space to let SuSe 10.2 create its own extended partition in the free space.(Yes Linux works better with others than Vista or OS X who need to be set up just right on the disk in order to work properly.) So at the end of the day my first harddrive is partition for 50 gig (Vista) 240mb for the HP Quickplay which MUST be the second partition of the drive to work properly, 30gig for OS X and the rest of Roughly 20 gig for Suse 10.2. My other 100 gig drive is formatted with NTFS for all my media and pictures etc. which I will be able to use under all three operating systems using FUSE (Filesystem in userspace) with read/write access. The Vista install went smoothly, no issues or surprises there. Certain hardware like the audio and video and southbridge were installed via Windows update and I was ready to move on to OS X. The OS X install was a little more problematic. I had to copy Chain0(search insanelymac.com) to my c drive and use Vista's klunky boot editor to add a line for OS X to chain load from. After that I edited my NetworkInterface.plist to recognize my Broadcom Wifi and installed a hacked ATI driver to boost my resolution back to the native 1400x900 and I am back in business.

After installing additional software like Macromedia Studio 8, Adobe CS 2 and I-life 06, I moved on to install Suse 10.2. Suse has been totally revamped, and while the install and hardware detection went fine as usaual, it took me a while to get used to the layout of the new KDE. After the base install I did the usual hacks found here. which includes enabling DVD playback and support for windows codecs and enhanced video drivers. I then installed all the neccesary utilities such as Kismet, Airsnort, Nessus, Dsniff and ettercap as well as support for enhanced widows decorations and tweaks using Compiz and XGL Now my laptop is officially SMOKIN! Most of the files and information I used to get OS X to work properly can be found here. Some of the drivers I used for OS X are:

Video : 200M

Power Management: Powerbundle