Easy(ish) Triple Boot on 2014 Macbook Pro

UPDATE* Feel free to read, but I've since renounced this process and made a new one here.
Nothing is easy. Or perhaps everything is. Regardless, here is how I did it, but first a little backstory:

I got a macbook pro 11,3 from work. I wanted a lenovo, but the boss wants me to do some iOS stuff eventually. Thats fine, cause I can install linux just as easily on whatever. Oh wait.. There are some caveats. Boot Camp seems to be a little picky. Just as well. MIS clowns set up boot camp so I had windows 7 and Yosemite working, but they told me I'm on my own for linux. It seems from the posts I've read about triple booting is that you have to plan it out from the get-go of partitioning, not just add it in as an afterthought. But I also found suggestions about wubi.



I've used wubi and didn't really understand what it did, but its actually perfect for setting up a triple boot system in my situation (where it's already dual boot and I want to tack on linux and ignore the other two). There is a lot of misunderstanding that wubi is abandoned and no longer supported bla bla. The real story is that the way wubi works doesn't play nicely with windows 8. Therefore if it doesn't work for everybody Ubuntu doesn't want to advertise it as an option. Its there, but they'd rather have everyone use the most robust method known: full install from the live cd/usb. Not that wubi is rickety or anything, but only works in certain situations (windows 7 or earlier). The reality is its on every desktop ISO downloaded, including latest versions (more on that later).

The way wubi works is important to note too (and its the reason that its perfect for this situation). Wubi creates a virtual disk inside the NTSC (windows) partition of the disk. So instead of dividing the hard drive space into two sections (one for linux, one for windows, and/or a third for OSX if triple boot) it doesn't create disk partitions at all,  just a disk file inside the existing windows partition. The windows bootloader is configured to open the windows partition then mount this file as another disk in whats called a loopback mode. This is distinctly contrasted to a virtualized environment where often a virtual disk is running on virtual hardware. You are using your actual machine, just your disk is kinda configured in a unique but clever way.

The main downside it sounds like is that you could have poor disk performance. It sounds like in extreme cases, VERY poor performance. Since this machine was intended for development its maxed out with 16GB ram, so I'm not even worrying about swap, and the 1TB hdd has plenty of space for all 3 OSes and its a fresh install so shouldn't be too fragmented. These are the best conditions for wubi. So far it seems to be working great. Install took a little trial and error though.

So I had to at least TRY to teach you something before giving you the recipe, but here goes:

1. I had to install bootcamp drivers in windows. MIS should have done that but they're clowns. You'll have to learn that on your own. There are plenty of resources for those poor mac users. This required a boot into OSX.
2. Boot into windows.
3. Use the on screen keyboard in the accessibility options of the windows to be able to hit ctl+alt+delete to make up for the flaw that macbooks have no delete key (SERIOUSLY?) Also don't get me started on how I miss my lenovo trackpoints.
4. I installed sharpkeys to remap the right alt to be a delete key so I could get around this in the future. I know sooner or later Cypress will make me boot into windoze.
5. Download the Ubuntu desktop live CD ISO (I did the most recent LTS. I'm not in school any more, gone are the days where I had time to change everything every 6 months).
6. In windows install something that will let you mount the ISO in a virtual cd drive. You could burn it to CD or make a live USB, but this was the quickest. I used WinCDEmu as it's open source.
7. Mount the ISO and copy wubi.exe off of the ISO's contents and into whatever directory the ISO is actually in (i.e. Downloads).
8. Unmount the ISO. This was not obvious to me and caused an error in my first attempt.
9. Disable your wifi. This was not obvious to me and caused an error in my second attempt. This forces wubi to look around and find the ISO that is in the same folder rather than try to re-download another ISO.
10. Run wubi.exe .
11. Pick your install size, user name, all that. Not that it matters but I just did vanilla ubuntu since I was going to install i3 over the Unity DE anyway. Historically I always like to do it with xubuntu, but I digress.
12. Hopefully I haven't forgotten any steps, but that should run and ask you to reboot. (I'd re-enable the wifi before you do reboot, or else you'll forget like I did and wonder why its broken next windows boot).
13. The reboot should complete the install and get you into ubuntu.
14. I believe the next time you reboot it will not work. For me it did not. Its due to a grub2 bug I understand. Follow the solutions in these two threads: 
1. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2218439&p=13094149#post13094149
2. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2217829&p=12996954#post12996954
15. To roughly summarise the process, hit the e key to edit the grub config that will try to load ubuntu. Edit the line
    linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-24-generic root=UUID=bunchofhexidec loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro
    ro should be changed to rw. This will allow you to boot. The first post tells you to edit an auto-generated file. Thats silly. what happens when it gets auto-generated and again and overwrites your fix? It even says not to edit it in the header. Instead you need to make a similar change to the file that causes it to have that error and then generate those files again as described in the second link.
16. Once that is sorted out you'll probably notice that the wifi is not working. You can either use an ethernet port adapter or a USB wifi card (or figure out another way) but get internet somehow and install bcmwl-kernel-source and it should start working (maybe after a logout. I don't remember).
17. Another tweak you will need is that this screen has a rediculously high DPI so the default fonts are all teensy-tiny. The easiest workaround is just to lower the screen resolution in the displays setting of unity-command-center, but you can also edit the font sizes in that dialog and/or using unity-tweak-tool. I'm still ironing that out. Especially since my secondary monitors are still standard definition. xrandr --scale is my only hope. Or just lower the resolution.
18. You might find that the touchpad click doesn't work as you expect. Try running the command:
    synclient ClickPad=0
    and see if you like it better. I sure do. Also enable two finger scrolling in the unity-control-center.
19. Also, importantly, wubi only allows up to 30GB of virtual disk to be created. I wanted a lot more than that. So I booted off a USB live stick I had laying around and followed the instructions here to make it a more reasonable 200GB.
20. Finally install i3-wm, vifm, eclipse, the kxstudio repos and everything else you love about linux.

So I love my macbook. Because its a linux box.