Triple Booting a Macbook Air

Download Windows 7 Bootcamp Drivers

It is possible to download the Windows 7 drivers with the Boot Camp Assistant, but I could never get this to work (the progress bar never passed 20%), so I had to use the alternate method below.

Download and Install Driver Package

Follow this link (http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-lion.merged-1.sucatalog) and search for BootCampESD.pkg. There were two entries listed when I did this, so I picked the one with the more recent value between the date tags, which was pointing here: http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/63/18/041-4777/GRGxJTrxPTSTdbBKFXt2bVjqVJGvBknRC3/BootCampESD.pkg

After downloading the file, simply double-click it to run it.

Copy Drivers to USB Flash Drive

After the install is complete, navigate to /Library/Application Support/BootCamp and double-click the WindowsSupport.dmg file to mount it. After the file is mounted, copy the contents to a USB drive for later.

Download and Install rEFIt

Download rEFIt from the website (http://refit.sourceforge.net/). It will make the whole process much easier. When the download is complete, simply double-click the dmg file to mount it and run the rEFIt.mpkg file to install.

When the install is complete, reboot the machine. I had to reboot twice before the change took effect (not sure why this was the case). It will be clear when rEFIt has taken over because the boot screen will have multiple graphical icons.

Partition Hard Drive

OS X supports live partition resizing, so the partitioning can simply be done using Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility, click the hard drive (not the partitions) on the left pane (mine says “251 GB APPLE SSD…”), click the Partition tab on the top, and add two partitions by clicking the + button near the bottom.

Both new partitions should be formatted as FAT and should be labeled clearly. I made a 50GB partition labeled WINDOWS and a 100GB partition LINUX while leaving my OS X partition at 100GB.

Install Windows 7

I think a USB flash drive can be used somehow, but I happen to have a USB DVD burner, so I used this instead for simplicity.

With the optical drive connected and the Windows install disk in the drive, reboot the Mac and press and hold the option key when the computer turns on. There should be a picture of an optical disk labeled WINDOWS that should be selected. It might take a little while (~30 seconds) for the system to find the disk if it does not appear right away.

Click through the first few steps until you are able to choose Custom Install. Select the partition labeled WINDOWS, format it as NTFS (you may have to click some link to enable advanced features to be able to do this), and click through the rest of the install process. This should be pretty straight-forward.  You should be able to select the WINDOWS partition whenever you need to reboot at the rEFIt screen.

When the Windows installation is complete, install the drivers that were copied to the USB drive earlier.

Remove Linux Partition

This step isn’t really necessary if the desired Linux partitioning is known, but it makes the process easier.

Disk Utility will be used as earlier (which means the computer has to be booted into OS X), but instead of clicking the + button, the - button should be clicked to delete the LINUX partition and leave it as empty space.

Install Fedora 16

This was by far the most challenging part to get right, but hopefully this will make it pretty straight-forward.

Download Fedora DVD

The first step is to download the install DVD (the Live CD WILL NOT WORK!!!). The DVD apparently has extra EFI capabilities that the Live CD doesn’t come with. It was a little hard for me to find the link, but it is here: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all. Near the bottom of the same page, there are links for torrent downloads, which might work faster.

Install Fedora 16

Insert the Fedora 16 DVD into the drive and reboot the computer, pressing the option key when the computer powers on. Two optical disk images may pop up, but the one labeled WINDOWS should be the one selected.

When the Fedora installer comes up, press the tab key and follow the steps displayed on the screen to add the nomodeset kernel parameter. The screen may remain black for a few minutes, but the installer should start up. When prompted, select the “Use Free Space” option if the LINUX partition was removed earlier, otherwise the partitions should manually be set.

When prompted, the boot loader should be installed to the disk (mine was /dev/sda), not the partition.

Sync MBR

After the Fedora installer is complete, cycle through the icons at the rEFIt screen and select the MBR tool. It should state that the MBR is out of sync, so it should be synced up. I only had to sync up the MBR once, but again, I had to restart twice for this to take effect for some reason.

After the computer reboots, all operating systems should be successfully installed. At the rEFIt screen, selecting Linux or Windows should boot into the Grub2 menu, at which point the proper OS can be selected.

Optional: Remove rEFIt

Because selecting Linux and Windows both led to the Grub2 screen, I thought having rEFIt was redundant. rEFIt can be easily removed by booting into OS X, selecting the OS X hard drive in Startup Disk to bless it, and removing the /efi folder.

If rEFIt is removed, the option has to be held when the computer boots and the WINDOWS hard drive selected in order to see the Grub2 menu.

Fedora Tweaks

Enable WiFi

WiFi and sound do not work out of the box. I was able to connect to the Internet via my phone over Bluetooth, but a USB Ethernet dongle can also be used. A simple yum update and reboot should enable the WiFi.

Enable Latest nVidia and WiFi drivers with RPM Fusion

The free and nonfree RPM Fusion repos should added by following the instructions at the RPM Fusion website: http://rpmfusion.org/

After the repos are added, run yum install kmod-nvidia kmod-wl. yum info kmod-nvidia and yum info kmod-wl can be used for more information on these packages, but they are just downloading the latest nVidia and WiFi drivers.

After the packages are done installing and the system is rebooted, the resolution should be set properly.

Enabled Sound

The sound modules all get loaded correctly, but the speakers seem to be muted for some reason. Run alsamixer -c0 as your user (does not have to be done as root) and make sure the main speakers are not set to MM. This can be toggled by selecting the main speakers with the arrow keys and pressing the m key. The up and down arrows can be used to set the speakers to the desired level. I set mine to 60.

When this is done, run alsactl store 0 as root. Reboot just to make sure everything still works, but it should.

Enable Two-Finger Scrolling

Two-finger scrolling is not enabled by default, but thankfully the only tweaking necessary here is clicking the two-finger scrolling checkbox in the mouse settings tool.

Other Notes

The brightness keys do not work. I have not tested any “advanced” functions like hibernate, stand by, etc.