Wish to Dual Boot Mint or Deepin with MacBook Air

[Sagitarii]

Hello everyone, I'm new to this community. I am an up-and-coming Network Support/Project Management/Operation Systems Admin in Seattle, WA.

My current project is to dual boot either Deepin or Linux Mint onto my MacBook Air (MacOS Mojave) WITHOUT erasing the hard drive and reformatting it. The largest obstacle I am struggling with is formulating a Terminal based solution or some other form of circumvention for creating a MBR partition on the APFS formatted 128Gb SSD. The resulting MBR partition will be used to hold the designated OS, ultimately.

Most of the documentation I have researched is either out of date or encourages erasure and reformatting of the SSD. The Disk Utility application will not currently allow me to create a partition. There is available space on the target SSD and I have backed up to an external off-site SSD.

Any help is appreciated, thank you all.

 

[wizardfromoz]

G'day @Sagitarii and welcome to linux.org

What I can do for you is to copy, rather than move, this Thread to Getting Started.

Then you have the benefit of still being able to meet a few of The Gang here, while getting help there.

I'll give the copied Tread a title helping people to zero in to assist.

Cheers and good luck.

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz

Edit added BTW

BTW couldn't quite get the copy right, so moved. By all means if you get time, run an Intro again and feel welcomed

 

[Sagitarii]

Status update: I am about to roll out another approach to this issue. I will add details if it contributes to the scope of the overall project.

 

[h1r0p0p87]

I had the exact same problem. I suspect it was either APFS or full disk encryption. I thought I had found some command line way to resize the partition but it did not work. I have multiple backups so I just decided to delete and start fresh.

Deepin works great after install and I had the least amount of problems with it. I decided to try something else because they didn’t have much of an English speaking community and I made the partition a little small so at some point I would have to redo everything.

I tried Opensuse next and I really wanted to like it but my wireless would not reliably connect even after installing some drivers so I ditched after a week for Fedora. Also, it installed a lot of apps and I was just overwhelmed by it.

I had some wireless problems at first also but I was able to resolve them and it’s been really smooth since. Fedora has worked out for me. It’s got a great community if I ever have a problem and the OS is stable and responsive. I like it’s way of installing things from the command line.