This article builds upon Triple Booting Windows 7, OS X (Chameleon), and Ubuntu 9.10 (Grub2).

I recently updated my desktop to Ubuntu 10.10 and noticed that the grub commands have changed ever so slightly. With the new installation, I just needed to create the /boot/chameleon/ directory again and copy the boot0 from Chameleon 2.0-RC4 into the directory.

One thing that I noticed is that the new grub script also presents 32-bit and 64-bit options for my OS X installation now, which I’m up to 10.6.3. I take care of loading 64-bit through chameleon though. Here is my new entry for loading OS X through Cameleon.

menuentry “Mac OS X Chameleon (on /dev/sda2)” {
     insmod hfsplus
     set root=’(hd0,msdos2)’
     search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set 62d3496cb25b59d8
     parttool (hd0,2) boot+
     chainloader (hd0,msdos4)/boot/chameleon/boot0
}

Sometimes it doesn’t copy correctly, but it should be two hyphens in front of no-floppy, fs-uuid, and set

You can find your uuid of your partitions by running blkid.

My current partition setup is:

• /dev/sda1: Windows 7
• /dev/sda2: OS X
• /dev/sda3: Swap
• /dev/sda4: Ubuntu Linux 10.10

So wouldn’t you know it, my video card died and I decided to get around to installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 at the same time.  Of course, installing Windows 7 took over the booter, then installing Ubuntu 9.10 took over the booter and did a great job at identifying Windows 7 and OS X.  In fact, it did too good identifying OS X.

The new version of grub2 is able to work directly with OS X to start it up natively.  Unfortunately,  I like to try to not patch OS X as much as possibly, so I use Chameleon, which grub2 was bypassing.  I don’t know what a beautiful solution is, but I do know what a working solution is.

OS with Loaders:

• Windows 7 (Default Boot Loader)
• Ubuntu 9.10 (Grub2)
• OS X 10.5.6 (Chameleon 2.0-RC4)

The first step is to install OS X however you usually do it.  Once it is installed, I chose to upgrade to the latest version of Chameleon for some of the additional video card identification that it was able to provide.  All that requires is downloading from the link above and following the directions.  Before you reboot, copy the boot0 file to removable media.

The next step is to install Windows 7.  Once this is done, Windows has now taken over the boot system and you can no longer start OS X.

Finally, it is time to install Ubuntu 9.10.   Once the install has finished, it has taken over the boot screen and you will see entries for Ubuntu, Windows, and OS X.  The only issue is, if you try to start OS X, it will bypass Chameleon and start the kernel directly.

To fix this issue, make the directory /boot/chameleon and then copy the boot0 from the removable media into that directory.  Then add or update the OS X section to the following:

menuentry “Mac OS X Chameleon (on /dev/sda2)” {
insmod hfsplus
set root=(hd0,2)
search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set 88e76bb6d81f12fb
parttool (hd0,2) boot+
chainloader (hd0,4)/boot/chameleon/boot0
}

The “88e76bb6d81f12fb” is the uuid of the partition. You can find the uuid by:

# user@teh-lunix:~$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

I currently picked up a $21 Dell Truemobile 1490 wireless card to put in my MSI Wind instead of the Realtek that’s in it. It install just fine, I got it working in Windows and Linux with no issues, but OS X was another story.

It wouldn’t connect to a wireless network at all by itself. On the menu bar it wouldn’t show any wireless networks. It did show “AirPort: Not configured”. If I opened the network preferences, it would show up as Ethernet 2 off. I would have to turn it back on each time I rebooted. I would then have to select the drop down box to pick a network because it still wouldn’t show any networks in the menu bar (and the menu bar would still say not configured). I could join my network and get an IP address, but the menu bar icon would not show any bars at all. It would be right next to the access point and I could surf the net just fine though.

Thanks to a post at InsanelyMac, I was able to finally fix this issue.

1. Open Network Preferences
2. Remove all devices except Firewire by highlighting the device and then clicking on the minus sign below the device list
3. Reboot the machine
4. Open Network Preferences
5. Click the plus sign under the device list and select AirPort
6. Click Apply

Since doing that, my menu bar works, networks are connected to automatically, even after reboots.