This past week I setup a cool dual-boot system on my MacBook so I can boot into both Ubuntu and Mac. I’m a big Ubuntu fan and I was eager to put Ubuntu on my MacBook. Big thanks to the Ubuntu team who made the task easy and wrote excellent instructions.
My laptop has three main partitions: Mac OS, Ubuntu and a shared home partition that I use on both Ubuntu and OS X. So I share all my files between Ubuntu and OS X. The home partition is formatted with Apple’s HFS+ file system with journaling disabled. That is the only Unix-type file system that Ubuntu and OS X both support well.
I also setup Thunderbird and Firefox to use the same profiles directory in both. So I can go to OS X, browse the web, make some bookmarks, reboot to Ubuntu and find the exact same bookmarks, the same tabs, the same browsing history that I left with OS X. It’s quite amazing actually. My Firefox settings, my extensions, my language packs… everything works the same between Ubuntu and OS X. Ditto for Thunderbird. Kudos to the Mozilla team.
Recently Sigrid and I bought an external hard disk. It is connected to my computer which runs an SSH server. Combined with a password-less SSH key, Sigrid can access the external disk from her Mandriva box just as if it was a traditional “shared folder”. On my end, I use symlinks to hide the different mount points for Ubuntu and OS X. Sigrid can connect to my computer and find the external disk in exactly the same place whether I am currently on Ubuntu or OS X.
