First grab the latest live cd here and then burn the iso using disk utility.

Then I used boot camp to make a partition. You could use disk utility, but heck boot camp has a little slider! I didn’t want to give up too much disk space right away, but i can easily see myself moving away from Mac OS to using Linux exclusively.

The next bits were impossible to get good screen shots but I’ll do my best to explain what happens. The first screen asks for the default install language, then you’re taken to your install options. I choose the second in the list, install normally.

Next you have to figure out what to use for disk space. Since I already created the partition using boot camp, I was able to keep the default settings and just continue installation. Be careful with this though, you could potentially wipe out your Mac partition. As a general rule of thumb, you never want to delete /dev/sd1 or /dev/sda2, as they are your boot partition and your main Mac OS partition respectively. Then it’ll take about 45 minutes and you’re up and running!

The bad parts…. right away i noticed that my iSight wasn’t working, and neither was the microphone. Speakers, wifi, ethernet, video drivers were all perfect out of the box. I tried this fix for the iSight, but so far I haven’t had luck with it. Really though, thats ok for me, I hardly use the iSight anyhow. My machine also seems to not sleep when I close the lid. Rather, it sleeps, but not as deeply as it does in Mac OS.

Overall though I’m really liking Ubuntu on my mac. It runs really smoothly and is super super fast. This is really really close to being ready for the masses I think. Like so close I’m tempted to say everyone should try it, buuut those funky driver problems and the need to still get ones hands dirty in terminal keep it from being 100% ready for mass consumption. I guess though you could argue windows has the same problems.