##Introduction and Motivation
This is the third part in a series on dual booting Arch Linux and Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro. This part covers partitioning the drive, the base Arch installation, and getting the dual boot setup. [Part One]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-1-creating-a-usb-installer “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 1 - Creating a USB Installer”) covered creating a bootable USB drive with the Arch Linux installer. [Part Two]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-2-preparing-for-dual-boot “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 2 - Preparing for Dual Boot”) discussed how to prepare the MacBook Pro. Setting up the system, configuring Xorg, installing Gnome and Awesome are all covered in [Part Four]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-4-system-configuration “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration”).
My day job has transitioned to system administration and infrastructure automation (Chef!). All of our virtual infrastructure (with rare exceptions) is based on Linux so I am keenly interested in learning more about its underpinnings. Setting up Arch Linux and sorting through its configuration challenges seems like a good way to jump into the deep end of the Linux pool.
[Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 1 - Creating a USB Installer]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-1-creating-a-usb-installer “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 1 - Creating a USB Installer”)
[Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 2 - Preparing for Dual Boot]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-2-preparing-for-dual-boot “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 2 - Preparing for Dual Boot”)
[Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 3 - Base Installation]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-3-base-installation “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 3 - Base Installation”)
[Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-4-system-configuration “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration”)
##Determine the MacBook Pro version Determine the version of MacBook Pro you have. These instructions are for a Mid 2010 model or 6,2 in Apple parlance. Minor hardware differences may make these instructions not work if you have a significantly different MacBook Pro, e.g., one with a SSD.
##Boot from the Arch USB Drive Insert the USB drive containing the bootable Arch ISO (from [Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 1 - Creating a USB Installer]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-1-creating-a-usb-installer “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 1 - Creating a USB Installer”)) and boot or restart the MBP. Hold the left Option key down until the drive selection window appears.
Select the EFI Boot disk using the arrow keys, and press enter to start.
Select the Arch Linux option from the boot menu, or let the time out do it for you. Once the initial boot completes (should be fairly quick) you see a prompt like this:
Arch Linux 3.17.6-1-ARCH (tty1)
archiso login: root (automatic login)
root@archiso ~ #
Congratulations, you’ve got root.
##Get connected You’ll need to be connected to the Internet to complete the setup. The easiest way is via Ethernet. If you don’t have Ethernet available, skip ahead to the Setup Wireless section at the start of [Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-4-system-configuration “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration”), and setup wireless now. These instructions assume you have working Ethernet.
Type:
$ dhcpcd
This will start the DHCP client and get an IP address lease from your LAN. You can verify that you have working connectivity by pinging something, Google for example.
$ ping -c 3 google.com
##Determine drive mapping In order to proceed you’ll need to know the drive mapping scheme. The easiest way to get that information is via
$ fdisk -l
which lists the existing partitions. If you created two partitions when preparing the MBP, you should see a partition with a Type of Apple HFS/HFS+ with a size that matches the size you set aside for Arch. In my case this was /dev/sda4. All the partitioning commands below will use /dev/sda4, you should substitute the designation for your drive.
##Partitioning
Now that we know the drive designation we can use cgdisk tp setup the partitions for our install. Run
$ cgdisk /dev/sda
to see the current state of the disk and to access the partitioning utility. The output will be similar to what is shown below.
Part # Size Partition type Partition name
3.0 Kib free space
1 200 Mib EFI System EFI system partition
2 78.8 Gib Apple Core Storage Macintosh HD
3 619.9 MiB Apple boot Recovery HD
4 223.4 Gib Apple HFS/HFS+ Untitled 1
128.0 Mib free space
We are going to add 6 partitons:
Linux boot loader 128 Mib
swap 8 Gib
boot 256 Mib
root 40 Gib
var 12 Gib
home ~160 Gib
The Linux boot loader will later be blessed as bootable using OS X. The final result should look like this:
Part # Size Partition type Partition name
3.0 Kib free space
1 200 Mib EFI System EFI system partition
2 78.8 Gib Apple Core Storage Macintosh HD
3 619.9 MiB Apple boot Recovery HD
4 128.0 Mib Apple HFS+ Linux boot loader from Apple
5 8.0 Gib Linux swap swap
6 256.0 Mib Linux filesystem boot
7 40.0 Gib Linux filesystem root
8 12.0 Gib Linux filesystem var
9 163.1 Gib Linux filesystem home
To navigate around cfdisk, use the left and right arrow keys to select a command and use the up and down arrow keys to select the partition and/or the free space. Once you have the partitions set the way you desire, select the Write option to create the new partitions.
Begin by deleting the Untitled 1 HFS partition created when you setup the MBP. Next subdivide it into the 6 new partitions. You can use K, M, and G to specify sizes. Accept the starting location offered by the tool when creating a new partition, then enter the size desired. You can use the L option to look up filesystem type codes. Apple HFS+ is af00, Linux filesystem is 8300 (the default), and Linux swap is 8200. Finally give the new partition a name. Repeat for each partition. On the last partition accept the default size offered to use up all remaining space. This means you should do home last to give it as much space as possible.
Select Write and then confirm that you want to overwrite the disk. Once the display returns you can Quit from cgdisk.
Running fdisk -l again should show your new partition scheme. If it doesn’t look like you want or expected, repeat the cgdisk process to fix things.
##Format the partitions Now it’s time to format the partitions.
$ mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda6
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda7
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda8
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda9
And create the swap and use it.
$ mkswap /dev/sda5
$ swapon /dev/sda5
Note that we skipped /dev/sda4 as that will be setup using OS X later.
##Mount the filesystem In order to acces the new partitions they must be mounted. First mount your root partition.
$ mount /dev/sda7 /mnt
And within the root mount just created, create mount points and mount boot, var, and home.
$ mkdir /mnt/boot && mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/boot
$ mkdir /mnt/var && mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/var
$ mkdir /mnt/home && mount /dev/sdc9 /mnt/home
##Install Arch
With the partitions created and formated, and with the filesystem mounted, the operating system can now be installed using pacstrap.
$ pacstrap /mnt base base-devel
This will install ~140 packages and could take a while based on your download speeds. Sit back and watch the progress.
##Set fstab
Once the packages are installed it’s time to record your file system settings in fstab. Use the genfstab command to generate your fstab
$ genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
You can view the fstab using less
$ less /mnt/etc/fstab
##Initial Configuration
Now you can set up your desired hostname, proper time zone, the hardware clock, create a user account for yourself, and enable sudo.
First you need to chroot into the new system.
$ arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Set your hostname.
$ echo arch > /etc/hostname
Set your time zone. I’m in the US Central time zone so I used Chicago. Adjust this to your location.
$ ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime
And set the hardware clock.
$ hwclock --systohc --utc
Create your user account and generate a password for it.
$ useradd -m -g users -G wheel -s /bin/bash you && passwd you
While you’re at it, create a root password too.
$ passwd
You’ll want sudo installed so that when you are signed in to your account you can run commands requiring root privilege. pacman is the command line package manager for Arch, so we’ll use that.
$ sudo pacman -S sudo
Edit /etc/sudoers and uncomment the wheel line. The -G wheel portion of the useradd command above added you to the wheel group. By uncommenting this group in the sudoers file you’ll allow all wheel members to run commands as sudo. You need to use visudo to edit this file.
$ visudo
Set your locale.
sudo vi /etc/locale.gen
and uncomment the locales you want. For me this was en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and en_US ISO-8859-1.
Generate the locale.
$ locale-gen
And set the /etc/locale.conf and export your settings.
$ echo LANG=en_US.UTF8 > /etc/locale.conf
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Double check /etc/mkinitcpio.conf to make sure keyboard is after autodetect in the HOOK section.
$ less /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
Then run:
$ mkinitcpio -p linux
##Bootloader configuration and setup
This is somewhat confusing. The best way to do this is to boot directly from your MBP’s EFI boot loader, which means creating a boot.efi.
Grab the package:
$ pacman -S grub-efi-x86_64
And then, edit /etc/default/grub and alter GRUB\_CMDLINE\_LINUX_DEFAULT to look like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
which I believe is the default setting.
Then you can generate the boot.efi with GRUB which you just installed. You’ll want to put this on a USB device because you’re going to be switching into OS X in a minute.
$ grub-mkconfig -o boot/grub/grub.cfg
$ grub-mkstandalone -o boot.efi -d usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi -O x86_64-efi --compress=xz boot/grub/grub.cfg
This is going to create a file in the current directory called boot.efi. Copy it to a USB device. Check your devices then make a directory to mount your USB. Copy the boot.efi file onto your USB drive. You may have to determine the path to the USB drive.
$ mkdir /mnt/usbdisk && mount /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdisk
$ cp boot.efi /mnt/usbdisk/
##Exit and reboot to OS X
Now you can exit chroot and unmount everything, and reboot back to OS X.
Exit chroot.
$ exit
Unmount all filesystems. And reboot.
$ reboot
Restart the computer and boot into OS X. Run Disk Utility and select /dev/sda4 which is the “Linux boot loader from Apple” partition created earlier. Using Disk Utility erase this partition by selecting “Mac OS X Journaled” and clicking on Erase. This is where the Grub2 image will go.
Open up Terminal and issue the following sequence of commands to create directories and files necessary for this partition.
$ cd /Volumes/disk0s4
$ mkdir System mach_kernel
$ cd System
$ mkdir -p Library/CoreServices
$ cd Library/CoreServices
$ touch SystemVersion.plist
Copy the boot.efi image from the USB drive as a peer to SystemVersion.plist.
$ cp /Volumes/usbdrive/boot.efi .
Edit SystemVersion.plist to look like this:
<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
<string></string>
<key>ProductName</key>
<string>Linux</string>
<key>ProductVersion</key>
<string>Arch Linux</string>
</dict>
</plist>
Next “bless” the partition so that it is bootable.
$ sudo bless --device /dev/disk0s4 --setBoot
Now when you boot or restart the MBP, a Grub menu with Arch Linux should appear. To boot into OS X you’ll need to hold down the left Option key. Test this and make sure it works before proceeding to [Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration]({{ site.url }}/2015/02/05/arch-linux-on-a-macbook-pro-part-4-system-configuration “Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 4 - System Configuration”).