More and more Linux operating system becomes popular especially for geeks, system administrators or developers. Several popular Linux operating systems for desktop are Ubuntu, LinuxMint and Elementary OS. This post will show you how to install LinuxMint 17.3 on MacBook Pro dual-boot with OS X El Capitan. This method should also be applicable for Ubuntu 15.10 and Elementary OS 0.3.2 Freya.
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Prepare the partition
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We can use Disk Utility to partition our disk. Create around 50GB of disk space for Linux. Set the partition format to MS-DOS(FAT). We can change to EXT4 Linux file system format later in the installation stage.
To make it easier, I have created a video how to partition the disk on OS X El Capitan.
Create Ubuntu / LinuxMint bootable USB Stick Installer for Macbook
We will install the Linux operating system using a USB stick. You need at least 4GB of USB stick. Ubuntu website already provides how to create a bootable USB stick on OS X on this page.
The steps is as follows:
To make it easier I have created a video on how to create Ubuntu / LinuxMint bootable USB stick on OS X
Restart the MacBook to boot on USB stick
After successfully create the bootable USB stick, it is time to boot the Macbook to USB stick. Press and hold Option key while booting to go to Mac boot menu. Select the EFI boot disk. If there are two EFI boot disks just select one of them. The Mac should boot into Linux running on USB stick.
Basically you can run the Ubuntu / LinuxMint / Elementary OS just from Linux. It is called Live USB Linux. You have to always and keep the USB plugged in to run Live USB Linux. If you wish to install it to hard disk, double-click the Install Linux Mint icon in the Desktop. Welcome windows will pop up. Just click Continue to start the installation.
On the ‘Installation type’ step above, choose ‘Something else’. We will install Linux Mint on the partition we have created on the above step. Then click Continue.
As you can see in the image above, select the partition then click Change to edit the partition. Format it as EXT4 file system and mount it as ‘/’. Click OK and then click Install Now. You may be warned that there is no SWAP space configured at the moment. Just ignore it. We can create swap space later.
Follow the on screen installation step. Once the installation complete, DO NOT reboot it now. Click Continue Testing. We need to install EFI boot manager, a tool used to modify the Intel Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) Boot Manager.
Open Terminal program then run the following command to install EFI boot manager.
Then run ‘sudo efibootmgr’ to see current boot status. See the image below for example.
As you can see above, BootCurrent is 0000 which is Ubuntu (Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu). BootOrder is 0000,0080 which means Ubuntu first then Mac OS X. To make sure the boot order is correct, run the following command:
You can now restart the Linux Mint Live USB. You should see Grub boot menu with Linux Mint in the first order.
Post-install configuration
Setting the Grub menu
As you can see in the Grub menu above, the Grub automatically probes and detects other operating systems installed in other partitions. It detects Mac OS X (32 and 64 bit) on /dev/sdb4. Unfortunately when we select it, it does not boot into the system. We need to manually add a menu entry of the OS in /etc/grub.d/40_custom file as follow for example:
As both menuenty of Mac OS X (32-bit) / (64-bit) (on /dev/sdb4) do not work, we need to remove it by disabling the Grub probe option. It can be done by simply make the file /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober not executable.
Then re-run the update-grub
Restart to see the new Grub menu as follows:
Install Wireless / WiFi driver
The wireless is not detected by default. We need to install the wireless kernel driver as follows:
Macbook Pro is using Broadcom BCMxx for the wireless firmware so we need to install it as above.
LaTeX is free software under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). LaTeX is distributed through CTAN servers or comes as part of many easily installable and usable TeX distributions provided by the TeX User Group (TUG) or third parties. If you run into trouble, visit the help section.
LaTeX is not a stand-alone typesetting program in itself, but document preparation software that runs on top of Donald E. Knuth's TeX typesetting system. TeX distributions usually bundle together all the parts needed for a working TeX system and they generally add to this both configuration and maintenance utilities. Nowadays LaTeX, and many of the packages built on it, form an important component of any major TeX distribution.
- The LaTeX Git Repository
The LaTeX team cannot guarantee that TeX distributions, even recent ones, contain the most recent version of LaTeX. It may happen that you need a more recent LaTeX than the one that your favourite TeX distribution carries, e.g., in order to get a particular bug fix. In that case you will need to fetch LaTeX from CTAN and install it on top of your distribution. See below for details.
TeX Distributions
If you’re new to TeX and LaTeX or just want an easy installation, geta full TeX distribution. The TeX Users Group (TUG) has a list of notable distributionsthat are entirely, or least primarily, free software.
Linux
Check your Linux distributions software source for a TeX distribution including LaTeX. You can also install the current TeX Live distribution directly---in fact this may be advisable as many Linux distributions only contain older versions of TeX Live, see Linux TeX Live package status for details.
Mac OS
The MacTeX distribution contains everything you need, including a complete TeX system with LaTeX itself and editors to write documents.
Windows
Check out the MiKTeX or proTeXt or TeX Live distributions; they contain a complete TeX system with LaTeX itself and editors to write documents.
Online
LaTeX online services like Papeeria, Overleaf, ShareLaTeX, Datazar, and LaTeX base offer the ability to edit, view and download LaTeX files and resulting PDFs.
CTAN
You can obtain LaTeX from CTAN, which is theprimary source of distribution for LaTeX. In order for your downloadedLaTeX to be of any use, you have to obtain and set up a TeX systemfirst. You can either install a TeX distribution (see above) or get aTeX system from CTAN. Ifyou use a TeX distribution then it will include a version of LaTeX sothis will probably make things easier for you; but you may have areason not to do this.
The LaTeX Git Repository
These days the LaTeX development sources are kept in a GitHubrepository (previously we used SVN).
Anyone can access it and download the files, butsubmission is restricted to team members. The repository is located at https://github.com/latex3/latex2eand from that browser page you may explore the files, clone therepository or download the files in a .zip archive (roughly 25Mb) byusing the appropriate buttons.
If you are familiar with Git you can also clone the repository using thecommand line or your favorite Git fontend tool, e.g.,
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which needs about 50Mb of space.Alternatively, you can do a Subversion checkout from the command line, e.g.,
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which will just checkout the current files.But be aware that a SVN checkout of the form
will download all files including theirhistory (back to 2009) and amounts to roughly 1.4Gb so that is quite large.
Note: If you had bookmarked the old SVN repository please update thatbookmark to the new GIT repository as we have finally removed it.
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A note on Git pull requests
Git repositories support distributed development and allow people toprovide change sets that are made available through so called pullrequests, so that the maintainers of a program can “pull the suggestedchanges” into the main repository.
While we appreciate contributions, we think that for the core LaTeXsoftware pull requests are usually not a good approach (unless thechange has be already discussed and agreed upon).The stability of LaTeX is very important and this means that changes tothe kernel are necessarily very conservative. It also means that a lotof discussion has to happen before any changes are made. So if you dodecide to post a pull request, please bear this in mind: we doappreciate ideas, but cannot always integrate them into the kernel andit is quite likely that we reject updates made in this way.
If you want to discuss a possible contribution before (or instead of)making a pull request, we suggest you raise the topic first onthe LATEX-L list or drop aline to the team.
Historic LaTeX
Ulrik Vieth has collected historic versions of LaTeX from LaTeX 2.0for TeX 1.0 (released on 11 December 1983) onwards. You can find thematftp://ftp.tug.org/historic/macros/latex-saildart/.There might even be some earlier versions. All files have been pulledfrom the SAILDART archive site at http://z.baumgart.org/ (no longeronline) which was based on archive tapes from SAIL at Stanford.
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More historic material can be found at ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic (you may not be able to open this in all browsers — alternatively try https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/).