This evening has been an adventure in imaging. On two fronts, I’ve conquered quite a bit. Allow me to break it down.
In conversing with a friend, we were discussing how certain colleagues had made light of her choice in portable computers because, “it cant run Linux.” Well, that snappy little computer can. So I set out to see about making it work, just to back her up and prove it. But, in order to get the correct boot loader onto my machine of choice, I needed to disable System Integrity Protection. Okay. Easy, Boot to recovery, then open terminal. “csrutil disable” and hit the return key. Restart, and we’re in business. Oh wait. No we aren’t. Dev build is installed. No recovery partition.
Okay. New plan. Server is running on the mini in the basement. Remote into mini. My install partition is woefully out of date. Download latest installer. Use System image utility to create a NetInstall package. Copy that to server. It recognizes. Boot other machine to NetInstall. Load terminal, disable System Integrity Protection, reboot.
I install rEFInd. It works like a champ. I download the latest distro of Ubuntu. Find a flash drive. Image with Ubuntu. I go to partition off a chunk of my hard drive. Wait. What? I have a ton of “purgeable space” but the system will only relinquish 30 GB? No deal. Local Snapshots is eating my HD alive. Back into terminal. sudo “tmutil disablelocal” password approved, service disabled. I restart. Woo! All my hard drive space is mine again. (full disclosure, the machine I’m messing around with is for this purpose. There’s no data concern. Otherwise, I’d be maybe not so reckless.) I partition off a chunk of space, and name it Linux. Victory.
And now, the fun part. I boot to the Ubuntu flash drive I created. I walk through the install/setup and select my newly created partition. It does its thing. Linux, now installed. Point proven. Now, lets see what we’ve actually done this evening, in the process of proving a point.
1. created a NetInstall NBI of Sierra.
2. Added that to Server and made sure it was recognized by NetInstall services.
3. Disabled System Integrity Protection via NetBoot.
4. Installed rEFInd.
5. Created an Ubuntu USB installer.
6. disabled LocalSnapshots via terminal
7. added a new partition to a hard drive
8. Installed Ubuntu
Overall, I’d call that a good evening.