Help - New to Ubuntu

[OlDirtyBabbey]

Hey,

I'm new to the forum. I'm a little stuck, and am gonna need some help. I've got a MacBook at the moment, and am fed up with it, and ready to make the move to Linux (after a year or two of heckling from a friend haha).

I'm a big minimalist, so when I install Ubuntu, I'd like to wipe OS X completely, and only run Ubuntu. I keep all my music on an external hard drive, and I'd obviously need to move all my files there while I wipe my computer and install Ubuntu.

Here's my beef: my hard drive's currently formatted for OS X, with something like ~30 gigs that are Windows compatible. Can Linux read a Mac-formatted external? Or will I have to transfer everything to a second Mac, install Ubuntu, and wirelessly transfer everything back to my computer, and from there to my newly reformatted harddrive?

I'm asking because my computer only has a 160 gig hard drive, and my 1TB external is almost full.

Thanks a lot guys

[kingluke]

Hi,

Presently, support for Mac formatted drives (HFS or HFS+) is not workable in any major operating system but Mac OS. Are you going to be installing Linux on the Macbook? If so, I'd suggest making a solid backup to another external drive first as get Linux running on a mac can be hella tricky, and it's very likely that you'll have to format the whole drive first. Borrow/buy/steal a spare drive, and copy everything to that. Alternatively, copy all the files from the external to the mac, then format the external as FAT32 (this can be done in Apple Disk Utility) and then copy the files back to the external.

If you're not installing to the Macbook, you can go ahead and keep those files on the drive. When your new GNU/Linux machine is is up and running you can copy all the files across- over the network - and not have to worry about partition formats.

You could also back it all up to optical media, then if a hard drive fails( I've had one at home and one at university fail on me in the last 3 months) you won't have lost everything.

As far as I know, the following operating systems have good native support for the following disk formats:
OS X:
-HFS (all subsets)
-FAT16
-FAT32
-ntfs (last time I used an ntfs drive on a mac the write support wasn't there, but that was a long time ago. I'd double check on this)
Unix file system

Windows:
-ntfs
-FAT32

Linux
-all of the above minus HFS

Therefore, for portability, most external drives on the market come pre-formatted as FAT32. You'll find this fine for a lot of things, but it won't let you write files larger than 2GiB

Hope that isn't too obfuscated

[OlDirtyBabbey]

Awesome, thanks!

What I'd like to do is totally wipe my Mac drive and only run Linux on it. I've had enough of these Mac shenanigans, let alone how I'm starting to feel about Apple as a company. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'm ready to do the change.

My problem is the amount of stuff I've got (movies and music and whatnot). My 1TB external's almost full, and my MacBook's internal drive is only 160 gig. I've very recently accepted the fact that I'm probably going to lose my movies and tv shows; my big concern is my music. I'm going to see if I have enough space on my laptop's hard drive to hold all my music while I reformat the external. Then I'll move all my laptop's contents to the external and boom - my MacBook will then be comprised of LucidLynx.

Sorry for the stupid questions, but just to be safe before I do it, FAT32 is compatible with both OS X and Ubuntu then, right? I'm bummed my external didn't come formatted that way - I had to choose between a Mac format or a Windows/Linux format.

Thanks again. If I'm feeling crazy, I'll give this reformatting a try tonight, although I'd prefer to have my Linux enthusiast friend around when I did it haha.

[kingluke]

Yep, FAT32 is supported almost everywhere.
I would however encourage you to read up on installing Linux on a mac. Although macs have intel chips these days there are still some big differences with the BIOS/EFI configuration so proceed with caution. You may want to try running it off an external drive or within bootcamp before you wipe everything.

Good luck

[OlDirtyBabbey]

Thanks. I'll try that now.