Ubuntu on MacBook Pro 7.1

[Hevlic]

Okay, so, I've done some research, and I still have questions pertaining to installing Ubuntu or Xubuntu on my Mac. I have downloaded a VM, and I must admit it has proven satisfactory, however, I still feel that sometime in the near future I will want to do a real installation on my computer (once the trackpad issue is resolved).

My questions are as follows:

1) According to this, help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleIntelInstallation, specifically the part that says:

[This information will not work for iMac (11,1) users and recent versions of Ubuntu (e.g., Maverick) [as t]he presence of the bios-grub partition that the Ubuntu installer creates by default (e.g., sda3) causes a conflict that prevents syncing the GPT and MBR partition tables. Deleting sda3 does not help since grub2 requires that bios-grub partition, nor will it use either sda or sda4 aborting with the error: "This GPT partition table has no BIOS boot partition; embedding won't be possible!". So installing Ubuntu with the bios-grub partition fails and installing without it fails]

I cannot install Ubuntu 10.10. However, I was wondering if this same issue is also commonplace in the earlier 10.04 release of this software.

2) After reading this thread, linuxforums.org/forum/laptops-netbooks-minibooks/165222-new-macbook-pro-7-1-no-linux-allowed.html, I was informed that Linux cannot be installed on a FAT formatted partition. So my question is, what formato should it be in? I was hoping simply to re-partition the Macintosh HD without affecting the Bootcamp side, and re-format the Linux partition.

As I have said before, I am very hesitant to do any sort of partitioning, and I will probably not install until after the apple trackpad issue has been resolved. And when I get contradicting information, such as here, help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro, I feel even less confident. This seems to tell me that one can install Ubuntu 10.10 on a Macbook Pro 7.1. And I'm just going to assume that all the other problems I've faced are because I chose to install Ubuntu within the Windows I run using bootcamp.

[Rubberman]

Stay with the VM for now. In the future, this may change and a native Linux installation on the Mac hardware may be a reasonable approach, but today... I think not.

[Hevlic]

Okay. Any word on the ubuntu-base-20060326.iso, or is it sort of an obscurity?

[Rubberman]

Okay. Any word on the ubuntu-base-20060326.iso, or is it sort of an obscurity?

I'm not familiar with that particular disc image, sorry. I started using Ubuntu with 7.04, so that .iso would have been from the previous release or three.