Dual Booting Tiger and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on PowerBook G4

So I recently inherited a PowerBook G4. I had to wipe the drive and install Tiger from scratch, which ended up being a real pain in the ass because this PowerBook only has a CD drive and our copy of Tiger is on DVD. I finally got a working set of CDs to install from and got it up and running. After which I thought, why not setup Ubuntu on this machine. It'll probably run faster than OSX Tiger on this old hardware.

As I considered how to move forward, it struck me that I had a small problem in the fact that the drive was not partitioned to accept another OS install since I just finished doing a standard OSX install. After a few Google searches, I found two extremely helpful posts with detailed instructions for changing partition sizes without having to purchase a dedicated partition software like iPartition or VolumeWorks. Many thanks to closet geek on the Ubuntu forums for his excellent post and to Rich Burridge whose post on his Sun blog helped clarify the process even further.

All you need to do is to make sure Journaling is turned off on your OSX HD. Then download and burn the Ubuntu 6.10 ISO image and boot from it as a LiveCD. From there you can use parted partition editing utility in Ubuntu to dynamically resize your OSX partition leaving however much room you want to give Ubuntu as unpartitioned space. That takes just a few seconds, after which, you just run the Ubuntu installer that appears on the desktop of the LiveCD. When the installer asks you where you want Ubuntu installed you just choose the largest contiguous unpartitioned space. Voila'.