Since I got my MBP and I put the TV card on the TV PC, I don't use my desktop very much. So a couple of months ago I decided it would be nice to have a linux server at home. I installed Debian with no problems at all and everything was working fine. But I haven't used it very much either, so I have removed it. Instead I'm going to put VMWare Player running another Debian, so I can have both Windows and Linux running at the same time. This will allow me keep sharing all my stuff on the home network as I used to do on the windows side, but also have a linux server running for testing my website projects.

So last night I got all set up. I deleted the old partition from my hard drive, I created a new one for reinstalling OSX and I left the rest as free space.

Reinstalling MacOS X Leopard was a piece of cake. Plus, doing it from the USB hard drive was super fast. Before I realized the system was already working. I haven't go through Software Update yet, so I'm still on 10.5.0. And I haven't restore my files and settings from TimeMachine either (hope they are safe!).

Next I installed rEFIt, set it up and rebooted. rEFIt is a software which will launch at boot time alowing you to select which operating system do you want to run. It will also allow you to boot from a "standard" install CD or DVD if you have any inserted. I will post later a couple of pics I took with my camera.

rEFIt booted with no problem at all. I had to main icons, the Mac and the Linux tux. I went to the Partition Manager, as suggested by miguev, and "fixed" the MBR, or whatever it does :)

Then I selected to boot from the Linux CD and... nothing happened. The screen switched to a little tux but the CD didn't start. I tried it a couple of times and then I went back to OSX so I could look for info on Internet.

I could find a solution anywhere, but after reading the installation steps on different websites I deducted what was the problem: I had not created a second partition for Linux yet.

In fact, that is not true. When I repartitioned my hard drive, I added two partitions. The first one I choose MacOS X Journaled. For the second one I choose Free Space. Guess what? Free space means no partition at all, hahaha. So yes, I ended up with only one partition, shorter than the full hard drive, but still only one. And apparently that confused rEFIt.

So I went back to Disk Doctor and after creating the new partition and "fixing" them with the Partition Manager of rEFIt, everything went fine. Kubuntu started loading and it did. Then I had to Install it to the hard drive, which surprised me, since I had never seen before an OS installing itself from a live boot :) Cool.

What next? Well, now I have to find out how to make the WiFi work on Kubuntu. Second I have to restore all my files and settings from timeMachine, which I haven't done before either.

Lost of fun!

Related:
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part I
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part II
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part III

After backing up my system and having Kubuntu ready for install, I had to make space for it. My hard drive is not very big, only 120GB, and it is pretty full already. I have only 40GB free, which I think should be enough.

First, I tried BootCamp, with no luck. It said something about fiels that couldn't be moved.

So I though I would have to do it from the install DVD (backup hdd in my case) using Disk Utility. But it didn't work either (I have no screenshots of that). The error in this case was something else, referring to the low space on disk for the operation.

I guess I'll have to start from scratch, erasing and partitioning my hard drive in two parts, one for MacOS X and the other one for Kubuntu.

I'll keep you posted.

Related:
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part I
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part II
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part III

So finally, it is time. I've been wanting to do this for a while and now I have decided to do it. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun and also I'm sure it will help me a lot in the future: I am going to install Kubuntu 7.10 on my MacBook Pro. Today!

Well, actually I started yesterday. That's why I was doing an extensive backup and looking for info all over the Internet.

First step: backup your system and find a way to recover it.

Next step: download and burn Kubuntu 7.10. This is not a big deal, of course, but since it was the first timeI have burned anything on my laptop (since I got it almost a year ago!) I thought it would be cool to take some screenshots.

Related:
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part I
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part II
Installing Kubuntu 7.10 on a MacBook Pro - Part III

What a wonderful command :) Of course "Spaniards.es" is the Apache log on Spaniards.es web server. I have never tried that before. I knew about tail --follow, which I love. But since 90% of the requests are additional requests generated everytime anybody visits the page (images, css, etc), following the whole log is kind of boring.

So usign grep -v one can remove anything reffered from the server itself. Thus, only direct requests and requests comming from other websites will show up in the output.

Now that's fun. I can see Google Bot hitting my server once every two secconds and Yahoo Slurp doing the same every now and then. I can see every time anybody searches something in Google and follows the link to Spaniards.es.

I love it!