Adventures in multibooting

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime.

I recently acquired a newer (2016) Macbook Pro and wanted to move my triple boot setup to it. That setup had (in addition to OSX):

BeOS

Windows 10

Linux Mint

Alas it seems I've been caught in the gap between new hardware technology and drivers catching up. Windows 10 does it all just fine but Linux Mint is having big issues with:

USB-C

PCIe NVMe (latest version)

As a result Mint can't even boot up on this laptop. I guess I have to wait for the Linux community to catch up on the chipset drivers before I can restore those two - as far as I can tell BeOS may never get this support. Oh well...... :)
 

Overmind One

GateFans Gatemaster
Staff member
Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime.

I recently acquired a newer (2016) Macbook Pro and wanted to move my triple boot setup to it. That setup had (in addition to OSX):

BeOS

Windows 10

Linux Mint

Alas it seems I've been caught in the gap between new hardware technology and drivers catching up. Windows 10 does it all just fine but Linux Mint is having big issues with:

USB-C

PCIe NVMe (latest version)

As a result Mint can't even boot up on this laptop. I guess I have to wait for the Linux community to catch up on the chipset drivers before I can restore those two - as far as I can tell BeOS may never get this support. Oh well...... :)
Mint 18 can't handle USB-C?
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
The Live version only sort of boots, an install using GRUB is DOA. The Live running off an external DVD player threw a kernel panic on USB-C when I tried to use it. I have a funny feeling I have to rebuild the Live DVD with a kernel update added.

Or...wait for full USB-C support and the new chipset to be on the regular install.
 

Overmind One

GateFans Gatemaster
Staff member
The Live version only sort of boots, an install using GRUB is DOA. The Live running off an external DVD player threw a kernel panic on USB-C when I tried to use it. I have a funny feeling I have to rebuild the Live DVD with a kernel update added.

Or...wait for full USB-C support and the new chipset to be on the regular install.

If only Windows had a Live CD version!
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
It comes pretty close - you can run it off of a USB key drive. On the MBP it runs natively in multiboot which is nice. Hopefully they will fix the NVMe and USB-C issues in Mint so it can do the same.
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
Meanwhile I am checking out OSX Sierra.

Overall not bad. Pretty fast (but then again this is screamer hardware) and they have made the Continuity features less in your face than they were in Yosemite. does what it is supposed to do. however see technical thread about Safari kernel panic.

Office Mac 2016 is really nice. It's fast, file fidelity is great and stability is excellent. Steam is also working very well as is Eclipse Neon.
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
I rebuilt my Live version (patched the kernel) and now it doesn't throw USB-C errors anymore. The NVMe problem seems centered in GRUB so that tells me I either need to wait for GRUB's community to address the issues or run Mint in a VM. I may go the VM route for now, as theoretically that could let me load BeOS again too.
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
So, I have a choice between Parallels and Fusion it seems. Virtual Box is having major issues with Sierra and also the new hardware and I can't tell if QEMU is compatible.
 

Overmind One

GateFans Gatemaster
Staff member
So, I have a choice between Parallels and Fusion it seems. Virtual Box is having major issues with Sierra and also the new hardware and I can't tell if QEMU is compatible.
I am partial to Parallels because of it's load balancing capabilities and ease of use. :)
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
Yeah, I was thinking that way too :)
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
And....Parallels 12 is up and running as is Mint 18.1:

Screenshot from 2017-03-31 02-26-08.png
 

Joelist

What ship is this?
Staff member
Sadly it seems FreeBSD and other pure Unix OSes except for OSX itself are incompatible with Parellels 12. So for now I may just as well stick with just Mint and W10. There is no point in running other Linuxes - for example Mint and Ubuntu are both derived from Debian and indeed Mint and Ubuntu are relatives directly too.
 
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