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I'm starting to use a mac, and would like to install different operating systems on it, and, if possible, share some partitions. (like home)

I'm planning to install Debian along with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and share it's home directory, of, if possible, at least, create a new partition only for my mp3 files.

Anyone knows a guide for it? Or risks in doing it... thanks!

Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
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  • If you're not requiring direct device access or 3D capabilities, a virtual machine running Debian would be an easy and lightweight option, not to mention more flexibility in how you use your (limited) disk space. – Daniel Beck Dec 16 '10 at 07:25

4 Answers4

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It's possible to use ext3 on a mac. I'm going through that route.

Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
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I guess one simple solution is to create the exFAT partition (same partition as many USB keys).

The support is very good on MacOs and Linux.

Saying that, FAT32 is so old that it does not support recent modern partition feature

Here is an excellent discussion on almost the same topics (cross platform with Linux / Mac / Windows)

sangorys
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  • Using ExFAT for the shared data partition leads (in my case) to every single file on the partition being marked as executable. Do you know whether there is any way around that?

    I’d rather they only have read+write permissions by default, unless I explicitly use ‚chmod‘ to make them executable. Is that possible to achieve? It seems weird that there‘s no way to share data between macOS & Linux that way.

     – pfincent Oct 17 '23 at 12:03
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You can mount your OSX partitions with "mount -t hfs". Doing that on a read-only basis (ie: "mount -t hfs -o ro /dev/sdaX") is very safe. I don't trust writes to it though. If you're transferring files between systems, it is better to setup an additional hfs formatted partition for that purpose.

Pete Ashdown
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  • Read-only sharing of home would defeat the purpose, if I understand the intend of the OP correctly. – Daniel Beck Dec 16 '10 at 07:23
  • OSX won't read filesystems common to Linux like ext*. Linux can read hfs and hfsplus, but I wouldn't trust it for /home use. When actually writing to an hfsplus system, you have to unmount it and fsck.hfsplus it before OSX sees it. Therefore, I really don't see a reliable way to share /home between the two systems. He can try it, but I'd back everything up daily. – Pete Ashdown Dec 16 '10 at 16:08
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If you are using several operating systems and you are not maxing out the CPU or disk speed the it might be easier to start with running the OSs in a virtual machine. There are severla including a free one Virtual Box This can allow the OS in the box to access data in shared directories on the host OS.

mmmmmm
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