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I have a Dell m3800 developer edition pre-installed with Ubuntu. I'm currently running 14.10. I am wondering if it is possible to triple boot Windows 10 and OS X Mavericks onto the computer?

Furthermore how would I go about downloading them and installing whilst making sure that grub isn't affected. Also I do not have any Ubuntu CD or install media

harperpeck
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  • karel & @LiveWireBT my main question was really about if there was anything specific that I had to look out for with multi-booting my computer. I asked how to wonder if there was anything that maybe you guy knew better than me or any addition. I know perfectly how to create a Hackintosh and mutli-boot. But zacharee1 truly answered my question of whether or not Mac OS X was even compatible with my system. – harperpeck May 06 '15 at 11:05

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You could only do this, to my knowledge, if you had bought a Mac with OS X already on it or obtained a copy of the OS illegally as I am pretty sure Apple has copyright laws against purchasing the OS off of the machine. Someone please correct me if I am mistaking about this.

However yes, if you get a copy of any of these OSes and create either a bootable CD or USB, create a separate hard drive partition for each it should be possible for you to triple boot your computer. There are videos on how to do this if you do a quick youtube search though it sounded like your question was more trying to figure out if triple booting is possible and the answer is yes as long as you have enough space to partition. Just search for dual boot instead of triple boot cause that is what all the tutorials seem to do but it will be the same idea when you get to dual booting.

Like I said, Apple doesn't sell their OS outside of their machines so unless you download it illegally you can't download it but Windows does sell them. In fact, Windows 10 is still in development so that is free at the moment and available for download here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-iso

Sam Hamblin
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  • According to their license agreement, Mac OS X can be installed on any Apple-branded computer. You could look at this technically and just put an Apple sticker over the Dell logo. – TheWanderer May 05 '15 at 17:09
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    @Zacharee1 except you can easily determine if it's Apple hardware because they use specific system boards, specific hardware, etc. Any variance thereof of major components immediately voids the agreement. – Thomas Ward May 05 '15 at 17:24
  • You can use any type of RAM in an Apple computer without voiding the warranty. Also, Apple's hardware is very generic. The agreement also refers to the whole computer, not separate components. – TheWanderer May 05 '15 at 17:25
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    @Zacharee1 RAM isn't major hardware. You also missed my point, and my guess is you're going to *continue to suggest ways to get around the license agreement, which could be a violation of certain countries' laws or regulations*. There's other ways to identify how it's not an Apple hardware as well, but that's irrelevant here. – Thomas Ward May 05 '15 at 17:26
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It is possible to install Windows, and that should be pretty easy, but your computer isn't compatible with Mac OS. I checked online and the only result I found for your computer was one saying it only boots into Safe Mode, which obviously isn't helpful. For Windows, though, get the Windows 10 Technical Preview ISO from Saige's link and burn it to a CD or a USB drive using UNetBootin. When you install WIndows, GRUB will break, but you should be able to get it as default again by using an Ubuntu LiveCD to chroot to your Ubuntu drive and reconfigure GRUB. You could also just use boot-repair which is provided as an ISO on the Ubuntu website. This should automate the process and get Ubuntu working as the default again.

TheWanderer
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There will be no problem with GRUB being overwritten by any other bootloader when you install all operating systems in UEFI mode, which is the default since computers ship with Windows 8. Just install every operating system as intended.

os-prober should be able to detect and include Windows and Mac OS in GRUB's menu, the answer to this question may be helpful: GRUB does not detect Windows

Further more downloading and installing Mac OS on a non-Mac systems looks very off-topic for this site to me and the same goes for instructions specific to a preview version of Windows that won't be available any more in a few weeks or months.

Community
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LiveWireBT
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  • By the way, the M3800 Developer Editiom doesn't ship with windows 8, it ships with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed – harperpeck May 06 '15 at 13:41
  • @Harper This obviously needs some explanation: Shipping a computer like the M3800 designed and certified for Windows (8) with another operating system and probably adding a fancy name doesn't change the fact that it is still a Windows computer certified for a certain release. To me these special editions are just half hearted commitments that are not comparable to actual support contracts ensuring that you can always run the latest version of Ubuntu without any flaws on engineering level. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32369.html – LiveWireBT May 06 '15 at 15:02
  • @LiveWireBT Actually the M3800 Developer Edition is not a Windows computer certified for a certain release. The M3800 Developer Edition ships with customized hardware selected by Dell to be compatible with Ubuntu, including future updated releases of Ubuntu. The Intel wireless and the NVIDIA graphics are among the most Linux-compatible models of their types of hardware that are available. – karel May 09 '15 at 06:44
  • @karel That doesn't sound very convincing to me (Intel Wifi has mostly been a safe choice, Nividia on the other hand...). Do you have a particular source for this statement that is more than just manufacturer marketing or the average shallow tech review? – LiveWireBT May 09 '15 at 06:56
  • @LiveWireBT Yes, I do have sources, they're in this answer: http://askubuntu.com/questions/618733/how-to-restore-dell-m3800-developer-edition/618736#618736. Furthermore I plan to maintain the answer and update it after Windows 10 is officially released if necessary. My sources in the answer are the official Dell website and the official Ubuntu on Dell Precision M3800 webpage at ubuntu.com. The statement about NVIDIA was made because NVIDIA is more aggressive than AMD about providing Linux drivers for new model GPUs, whereas AMD makes you wait longer for their drivers. – karel May 09 '15 at 07:07
  • @karel That is not exactly what I was looking for (but I upvote anyway). I would have expected to find a separate UEFI firmware download for this product, which doesn't seem to exist, or some other indication/documentation for changes made to improve Linux support. I assume that both products run the same firmware (=certification for Windows), where one is just stricter with the choice of available components to choose from. The support level in this price range is above average, but I don't see much difference to a comparable product sold only with Windows. – LiveWireBT May 09 '15 at 07:29
  • Why would Dell want to offer Linux binaries on their website anyway? If they wanted to offer their own binaries they might even offer their own operating system like Oracle does with Solaris to resolve the trusted software issue, and then almost nobody would use it because they prefer to use Ubuntu anyway. – karel May 09 '15 at 07:41