“Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way.”   - http://wubi-installer.org/

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 yesterday on my Bootcamp partition so that I had three operating systems installed without touching the Apple boot loader. In this post I will walk you through all the steps necessary to achieve this feat.

Install Windows XP (or Vista if you prefer) on a boot camp partition using Boot Camp Assistant in Leopard. This is a fairly simple process with one caveat: you may have to re-install/restore your machine. The reason? Your Mac’s hard drive may become fragmented with large files and the mini-defragmenter included in the boot camp assistant doesn’t have the strength to move the files. This is very simple to do via time machine, just back up your entire hard drive (the small backups don’t work) and when you are reinstalling, go to Tools > Restore From Backup.

Install Ubuntu. This needs to be done inside the partition you created in the last step. First, do one of the following: insert an Ubuntu 8.04 CD (you can also place an ISO in the same directory as the Wubi installer or let Wubi download one), choose “Install on Windows” and you will come to a screen like this. Enter all the settings as you would like them and click install. After a little while you will get a screen like this. Choose “Reboot now”. As your computer is rebooting: Hold down the option/alt key until you come to a white screen with two hard drives, one labeled yourharddrivename and the other one Windows HD. Click on the arrow below Windows HD, It will start to boot into windows where you will be faced with another option: boot into windows or ubuntu. For now, choose Ubuntu. The Ubuntu installer will now finish the install.

There we go. You have now triple booted your mac. If you have any questions about this or any other posts send me an email.

Note: If you use VMWare Fusion or Parallels you can also open the boot camp partition and choose either windows or linux.