I am going to call this the definitive guide to dual-booting OS X Snow Leopard and Moblin Linux. This will be divided up into two parts, one for setting up the dual-boot, another for getting a working wifi connection.


Main steps:

• Install and Update OS X
• Install and Update Moblin
• Setup GRUB for the Dual Boot

To get a functioning dual boot, you will need the following.

• A Dell Mini 10v
• An OS X Snow Leopard Install USB (8GB+ drive required)
• A Moblin Live USB (Guide can be found here)
• A wired connection for the wireless setup

Install OS X Snow Leopard

1. Turn off your Dell Mini 10v, and insert the OS X Snow Leopard Install USB.
2. Turn your computer on, and press F12 before the logo leaves.
3. Choose USB Storage.
4. If there is an progress bar, let it run out. If not, then choose Mac OS X Install DVD.
5. When the drive finishes booting, choose your language, and click the arrow in the bottom right hand corner, or hit the “Enter� key.
6. Go to the Utilities, and choose “Disk Utility�.
7. Select your hard drive from the list on the left sidebar (If you have the stock hard drive, the listing might say something like 160.04 GB WDC WD1600BEVT-75ZCT2).
8. Go to the Partition menu.
9. Under Volume Scheme, in the drop down menu, I recommend that you choose 2 Partitions. It divides the hard drive in two partitions, making installation easier. You may change the partition size if you need.
10. In the first partition, in the right of the diagram, name your partition as you wish, format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)�.
11. Make the second partition “Free Space�.
12. Click the “Options...� button under the hard drive diagram. Choose GUID Partition Table
13. Click Apply, then click Partition.
14. Close the application when its finished.
15. Click Continue, and click Agree.
16. Choose the hard drive, and click Customize if you wish.
17. Click Install, and off you go!

Do know that I have had the experience of having the installer freeze occasionally. No worries, just move the mouse, and the thermometer will jump to its real position. I have also seen the installer freeze and 10-11 minutes left. This is normal. You can move the mouse all you want, but it will not unfreeze. The installer will not go past 10 minutes left. If you have it go past 10 minutes, please let me know, and I can edit this.


Updating OS X Snow Leopard


There are many ways to update your Hackintosh, the most common being running NetBookInstaller, and running “Software Update...� from the Apple menu. Just make sure that your OS X is completely updated before continue.


Installing Moblin

1. Turn off your Dell Mini 10v, and insert the Moblin Live USB.
2. Turn on the computer, and press F12 before the logo leaves.
3. Choose USB Storage.
4. Let the USB load, then choose Installation Only.
5. Let it load, and click “Next� at the splash screen.
6. Choose your language, and click “Next�.
7. The keyboard is an U.S. English keyboard, so just click “Next�.
8. Choose the closest city to your location.
9. At the partition editor, choose “Use free space on selected drives and create default layout� from the upper drop down menu. Check “Review and modify partitioning layout� if you wish. Click “Next� when finished.
10. After the image is done copying, leave all the GRUB info alone, we will edit it manually later.
11. Enter a user name and password, click “Next� and that's all! Click “Done� and the installer will exit. Reboot the computer for setting up the dual boot.

Setting up the OSX/Moblin dual-boot with GRUB


I have looked high and low for a way to dual boot OSX and Moblin with Chameleon, but unfortunately, Chameleon does not support booting from an ext2/3 partition, which is that Moblin requires. When you reboot your computer for the first time after the Moblin installation, you won't have a choice but to boot into Moblin. Let's fix that. For this you will need your wired connection. Better yet, keep the wire plugged in if you want to jump from dual-booting to setting up the wifi.


First, a few things that aren't required, but very helpful. Notice the four applications in the bottom left hand corner. You should have a media player, a web browser, an about Moblin, and a Moblin Application Installer. You don't have to have those four applications. You could also have more if you wanted. If you go to the applications menu, you will see a Favorite Applications area. If you roll over one of the favorite applications, you will see a purple pin in the corner. If you click that pin, it will no longer be on the myzone screen (home screen). Here are the applications I recommend that you “pin�: Web Browser, Moblin Application Installer, Terminal, File Browser, and Manage Apps. Those are the five apps we will use in this tutorial. Now for the meat of the tutorial!

1. Launch Terminal.
2. Run “sudo yum update�. We need to update the computer eventually, so why not do it now? You need to keep running that command until you get a message that says “No Packages marked for Update�. To rerun a command without having to type it again, hit the “Up� arrow key, and it will cycle through previous commands.
3. After updating, make sure that you reboot. There is a kernel update, and rebooting is good.
4. Launch “Manage Apps�
5. In the “Filters� menu, uncheck “Only newest packages�.
6. Search “netbooks�. There should be four packages. Two should be called Anjal. Ignore those. The other two are the kernels. We only want one of them, and more likely than not, they both will be installed (i.e, checked on the left). Uncheck the one whose subtitle is “kernel-netbook-2.6.31.5-10.1.moblin2 (i586)�. If it is already unchecked, then you are good to go!
7. Click “Apply� in the corner, and let it run. When it is done, close the application, and launch Terminal.
8. Run “sudo gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf�. This is where we edit the GRUB listing (i.e, “turn on� the dual boot function).
9. If you followed the instructions on setting up the partition places of the systems, then this step should be easy. So it's OK if you resized one of them. If not, then this step might be a little difficult, but if you read my explanation, then we should be good.
10. Copy and paste all this code into your grub.conf, removing all previous text.

    # grub.conf generated by anaconda
    #
    # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
    # NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
    #          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
    #          root (hd0,2)
    #          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda3
    #          initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
    #boot=/dev/sda
    default=0
    timeout=10
    splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
    title Moblin
    BUILD: moblin-2.1-final-20091103-002 (2.6.31.6-17.1.moblin2-netbook)
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.6-17.1.moblin2-netbook ro root=/dev/sda3 quiet vga=current
    
    title Mac OS X (10.6 Snow Leopard)
    rootnoverify (hd0,0)
    makeactive
    chainloader (hd0,2)/boot/boot0

11. The default=0 means that the first listing is the default listing to boot into after the timeout time, which we set at 10 seconds (default=10). After the splash image listing, you see the “title Moblin� listing. All the indented items after that have the info about booting into Moblin. After the empty line, you see “title Mac OS X (10.6 Snow Leopard)�. I'm not sure what the rest of that listing is, but it is all important. You won't have to change anything in the bootloader listings if you followed my partition suggestions, ie, the positions of the partitions, not the sizes. Those don't matter to the bootloader.
12. Next, you need to go the Chameleon bootloader site, and download the RC3 binary package. I'm not sure if the RC4 binary package will do it, but I'm not willing to try it. When download is done, open the File Browser application, locate the archive, and extract the boot0 file from the i386 folder. Extract it to your home folder. Close all windows, and launch Terminal.
13. Run “sudo nautilus�. This will launch the file browser application with root privileges. Chose the hard drive from the sidebar, and follow this path to your boot0 file: /home/<username>/boot0.
14. Hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab. In the new tab, go to /boot. Go to your home tab, right click on boot0, and choose copy. Go to the boot tab, and paste the boot0 file. Close all applications, and if you did this section right, you can reboot and have a fully functioning dual boot!.

Setting up the wifi in Moblin


This is where you need to make sure that your Moblin installation is fully updated. You should have had it fully updated before we set up the dual boot, or it shouldn't have worked. But now is the time to make sure that your computer is fully updated by running “sudo yum update�. After the update, reboot into Moblin just to make sure that you are running the latest kernel. You need to download the wifi driver setup (http://www.zeroepoch.com/download/mo...oblin.i586.rpm). Normally when people try to write guides to get the wifi working in a Moblin setup, they have to compile the kernel and a bunch of other stuff that you really don't need to do. And when they got the driver compiled, it still wouldn't work because they didn't have latest update. This specific wifi driver only works for the latest kernel update. This is why you should have copied the grub.conf I posted because it boots into the latest kernel, therefore the ability to have wifi.


A few warnings: When you need to run NetBookInstaller, make sure that you disable to installation of Chameleon. The reason being when you install Chameleon, it writes over GRUB, disabling your ability to boot into Moblin. If you do accidentally install Chameleon over GRUB, then you need to download an Ubuntu Live USB, and install GRUB from the Terminal.

I hope this guide helps you, since it is a compiled source of a bunch of confusing and misunderstood guides. Thanks for reading.

[Jujube]

Very Good Guide, I had previously had this working but erased it and went to install ubuntu netbook version.

I was disappointed that I could not get the chameleon bootloader to work.

and also annoyed that moblin can't mount MAC OS extended disk.

I really got annoyed by the error everytime I would boot into moblin, and couldn't find a work around.

Other than that it's a neat idea, to have choice of booting OS in couple of sec to check internet and stuff.

Have you notice any change in Battery usage between OS?

Have you heard of Mandriva? InstantOn | Get wilder, get faster.

Again Good Job

[steve19137]

yes, i have heard of mandriva, but i found something better. i am an active linux user, so finding a distro that is perfect is very hard. i think i might have found the perfect distro: linux mint. in reality, its not much different than ubuntu. it is actually 98% ubuntu, 2% mint. but that two percent is perfect. it has a windows like menu in the bottom corner and one windows like taskbar. and theres just something about it that makes it perfect. so im using that and soon windows xp as a dual boot. maybe you should look at that.

i havent found any work arounds for the os x mount error, or the occasional mutter or clutter error. i just learned to expect and live with it. no biggy.