Latitude E5470/E5570 Triple-Boot MacOS Catalina, Windows 10, Ubuntu 20

Fortunately, Hacintoshing has gotten easier through the years due to the hard work of a lot of people on tools and procedures. So it only took a few days to get my Dell Latitudes E5470 and E5570 working with MacOS Catalina. But since it was still a bit of a challenge, I wanted to write up my procedure. I’m sure I’ll be doing this again at some point and it may help out others. And with Big Sur around the corner, I may try to do all this again when Big Sur is released.

As usual, I made this harder on myself by wanting to do a triple-boot option with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. Fortunately, again, this process has gotten easier and just works better now than it has before. For the majority of people who won’t be doing a triple-boot scenario, the sections below are labeled with what is in them so you can do only what applies to your install. Although if you won’t be installing MacOS at all, then you should skip this guide since it relies on the Clover bootloader which is unnecessary if you are going to just use Ubuntu and Windows.

Why Hacintosh? The main reason for doing it on the laptop is because I can. I generally use Windows for work on a laptop and MacOS for home on a desktop so doing it on the laptop isn’t a necessity. But it is nice to be able to take MacOS with me on occasion. And this build worked out so nicely, I may use MacOS on the laptop more often than I have in the past.

Most of the steps here were compiled from OSXLatitude.com. In particular, the general Hacintosh process is detailed in a Dell Latitude guide. Then I used various other posts (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) to pull the pieces together for this guide. Huge thanks to the team at OSXLatitude for the hard work and responsiveness. If you find this guide useful, please consider donating to them.

My E5470 and E5570 were able to be Hacintoshed as is except for wireless networking and Thunderbolt. The i5-6440, SSD, and 1600×900 display all worked fine on the E5470 and the i7-6820HQ, SSD, and 1920×1080 display worked fine on the E5570 too. Unfortunately, the stock wireless network cards were Intel cards for which there are no MacOS drivers so I needed to replace the cards. For info about wireless network card compatibility, OSXLatitude has a handy post. The replacement network card I bought for each is the Fenvi BCM94360NG because it works out of the box. Keep in mind that you’ll need to add $50 (at the time of this writing) to your planned cost of your Hacintosh if you want to go with this card and get WiFi working.

As for Thunderbolt, there’s a lot of work going on with that that’s all over my head. The Thunderbolt in my E5570 is the Intel Alpine Ridge (0x8086 0x15B5) which is fairly common but for which Hacintosh support is still somewhat light. And it seems that the issue of hotplugging devices in a Thunderbolt port, even if they are only USB-C or DP and not full Thunderbolt devices, is a tricky proposition for any Thunderbolt device. So, unfortunately, I was not able to get the port working like I’d want. But at least the AML file that is included and described later allows for a Thunderbolt device to be accessed if it is plugged in at boot up and remains connected. That’s better than nothing.

I should also mention that just because it looks like a Thunderbolt port, doesn’t mean it is a Thunderbolt port. It could be just USB-C and DP. Based on this article from Dell, certain computers can be ordered with the additional Thunderbolt driver as an option. So if your computer was not ordered with that from the factory, and you have something that looks like a Thunderbolt port, the port is only a USB-C or DP port. And if that is the case, you will need to get the USBInjectAll kext, run Hackintool, and add in that port as a USB-C port. The USB ports enabled in my bootpack are only the 3 USB-A ports on the back and sides. Sorry – I wish I had a E5570 with a non-Thunderbolt port that I could use to set up the right USBPorts kext.

As usual, if anything written here causes computer failure or data loss or anything else happens to you as a consequence of what I have written, whether legal, physical, or emotional, it’s all on you. And if things like creating partitions, typing in terminal, or making changes in the BIOS are tasks with which you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, now is a good time to click the “Back” button in your browser and go somewhere else. But thanks for visiting.

Overview And Jump to Sections

• A. Getting Required Software for MacOS
• B. Create the MacOS Installer UFD
• C. Prepare Target Computer
• D. Install MacOS
• E. Post-MacOS-Install Tweaks
• F. Getting Required Software for Windows
• G. Create the Windows 10 Installer UFD
• H. Install Windows 10
• I. Post-Windows-Install Tweak
• J. Prepare Ubuntu Installer UFD
• K. Install Ubuntu
• L. Post Ubuntu Install Tweaks
• M. Final Tweaks

A. Getting Required Software for MacOS

The whole process starts with getting a copy of Catalina. As in the past, you need to be running on MacOS to get a copy of the upgrade for MacOS. But new to me was the issue of how the new MacOS installer may be only an empty container. For some reason, when you download the installer, sometimes you get the full installer and other times you get something that calls itself the installer but is missing all the good stuff inside it. And the latter did happen to me.

Fortunately, the Hacintosh community has taken care of this and “dosdude1” has a tool that lets you download the real installer. I don’t know for sure how it works but I think it basically simulates doing the installation to get the real content directly from Apple. His tool offers more than that but to be as pure Apple as I can, the only thing I did with his tool was get the installer.

Do the following on a computer running MacOS – the “source” computer:

1. go to http://dosdude1.com/catalina
2. click to Download Latest Version
3. double-click the DMG that was downloaded
4. ctrl-click MacOS Catalina Patcher in the drive image folder and select Open and if you get a security warning, you can proceed to run it (it may take a few minutes for verifying to finish)
5. click Continue twice, then click Download a Copy, Start Download, then Quit with Command-Q
6. move the downloaded “Install macOS Catalina” application to the Application folder – yes to overwrite if you have the minimal installer app already there

This is a good time to get the other things you’ll need. Start with the Bootpack I’ve attached here.

7. Download the E5470 Bootpack (which works with the E5570 also) and extract it to your UFD so that the top level folder on the UFD has the folder named LatE5470 Bootpack.

You will also want to get the Clover bootloader package. Note that the location I used to get Clover is not “Dids” but is “CloverHackyColor” – I don’t know why but it worked better for me. Also note that I’m going to link to a specific version that worked for me, version 5119.

8. download the Clover 5119 “pkg” from installer pkg from CloverHackyColor

My attached Bootpack includes the versions of WhateverGreen and Lilu that I used but if you want to get newer versions, you can get them using the following links.

9. Lilu
10. WhateverGreen

Finally, get the Clover Configurator app for later use.

11. Clover Configurator

B. Create the MacOS Installer UFD

Now with the installer app available (the real one and not just a hollow container), you can create the MacOS Installer USB Flash Drive (UFD). You will need a USB drive that has at least 8.38 Gb available so unless you can find a 9 Gb drive, go for a 16 Gb drive. And my suggestion is that you plan to keep it around and label it as an installer.

Historically, I have aimed for a DVD installer. I like DVD installers better because the media is flat, cheap, and sits nicely on a shelf with my others and I keep it in perpetuity. But besides being slower to use than a UFD, a lot of computers don’t have optical drives. Including both the E5470 and the E5570. I do have an external drive I could use but that would make things more challenging. Also, the boot process uses the UEFI loader which I have had difficulty getting to work from DVD. So for this install and future ones, it’s going to need to be UFD installers for me.

I start the process with erasing the UFD even though the createinstallmedia command will do it because I think it worked better for me to have the drive wiped before starting the createinstallmedia process. But it may turn out to be overkill.

1. insert UFD and open Disk Utility
2. select the UFD (not any child partition of that drive) in the sidebar and click Erase
3. leave the name and format alone and change Scheme to GUID Partition Map and then click Erase
4. when finishes, exit Disk Utility

Now it’s time to write the installer to the UFD and this will take a bit. Maybe 10 minutes?

5. Open Terminal and type the following command:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/“Untitled” --nointeraction

Now with the UFD set up to install MacOS we need to set it up to work on non-Mac hardware. That starts with installing the Clover pkg (not the Configurator) and then we replace files with the contents from the Bootpack. Note that I’m not detailing which drivers to choose during the Clover install because the ones I want are in the Bootpack. But if you want to know which ones, check out the OSXLatitude general guide.

6. double-click on the Clover pkg file
7. click Continue, enter password if asked, Continue, Continue
8. very important: click Change Install Location
9. choose Install macOS Catalina drive (not the system drive of your computer!), Continue
10. click Install

After the Clover bootloader is installed on the UFD, the EFI partition of the UFD will now be mounted. We’ll use that mount point in the follow up steps to move the Bootpack contents to the UFD’s EFI.

11. open the EFI folder in the Finder and delete the BOOT and CLOVER folders from the EFI folder
12. copy the contents from the Bootpack EFI folder into the EFI folder
13. eject the EFI volume by clicking the eject icon next to the volume name in the sidebar of the Finder window

The EFI folder is all set and we are going to now load some additional tools on to the UFD.

14. open finder and double click on the UFD named “Install macOS Catalina”
15. copy from the source computer the same Clover pkg file that was used to install Clover on the UFD in the prior step to the UFD folder
16. copy the Clover Configurator from the source computer downloads to that UFD folder too
17. and copy the Bootpack folder to the same place on the USB installer
18. Eject the installer USB drive by clicking next to the volume name in the sidebar of the Finder window

C. Prepare Target Computer

Next I wiped the hard drive (SSD) clear with BIOS. This may be overkill but I’ve had issues before with remnants of different partition schemes confusing future set up and I really wanted to start with a truly clean slate.

1. F2 on boot, select Maintenance, Data Wipe, click the checkbox “Wipe on Next Boot”, click “OK”, click “no”
2. click Exit to reboot, select Continue, Enter, select ERASE, Enter
3. drives are wiped clean, hit Enter, computer reboots

Now we need to get the laptop back to BIOS Defaults to make sure there are no other settings that could cause issues. I tried Factory Defaults and I had a hell of a time getting the UFD to be recognized. I couldn’t figure out what setting was the problem but I did find that the BIOS Defaults resolved the issue. So when asked about what to Restore, be sure to choose “BIOS Defaults”. Then we need to put the BIOS back the way it will work best for MacOS.

4. F2 on boot, click Restore Settings button, BIOS Defaults, OK, OK, Yes to continue if you are asked, click Exit to restart
5. F2 on boot, confirm General -> Boot Sequence, change Boot List Option to UEFI if it isn’t already
6. confirm General -> Advanced Boot options has Enable Legacy unchecked
7. change System Configuration -> SATA operation to AHCI, Yes
8. change Security -> TPM to Disabled (you can leave the “TPM On” checkbox checked)
9. confirm Secure Boot -> Secure Boot Enabled is set to Disabled
10. change POST Behavior -> Extend BIOS POST Time to 5 seconds
11. Apply, check box for Save as Custom User Settings, OK
12. Exit, computer reboots

D. Install MacOS

Now it is time to figure out what you want for a partition plan. If you only want MacOS, then this is easy – one partition for your whole drive. For my E5470 with a 256 Gb SSD, I figured I’d set up Time Machine on this disk too as it will be used primarily as a Mac. And for this computer, I’m going to dual-boot (no Ubuntu) so I need a partition for Windows. I decided on dividing up the 256 Gb SSD so that I had 100 Gb for MacOS, 92 Gb for Time Machine, and 64 Gb for Windows. For my E5570 with a 500 Gb SSD that will be used primarily in Windows, I decided on 375 Gb Windows, 90 Gb Mac, and 35 Gb for Ubuntu. (And I’ve got a 256 Gb M2 2242 inserted into the WWAN port as a second drive that I’ll use as backup.) So figure out what you are going to need for partitions and keep that in mind for the steps below.

I tried formatting the Time Machine drive as “MacOS Extended (Journaled)” during the install but it confused the hell out of the installer. So I found that temporarily formatting all partitions other than the MacOS partition as ExFAT works best.

Picking up with the last step above, the computer will have just rebooted and it will say that there are no bootable devices.

1. power off, connect the AC power adapter if it is not already and plug in to a wired network connection, insert USB installer drive in one of the “SS” jacks, and power on
2. on Dell logo, hit F12 to get boot device menu
3. highlight the USB installer drive (probably the only one) and hit enter
4. Clover boot screen shows “Boot macOS Install from Install macOS Catalina”, hit Enter
5. installer starts up; if asked, select Language and click the ” ->” button
6. select Disk Utility, Continue
7. select the Internal drive on left sidebar, click Erase, change the name to MacOS, change the format to APFS (just plain “APFS” without any parenthetical details), then click Erase
8. this should go quickly; click Done when it finishes
9. select the same Internal drive on the left sidebar, click Partition button, and click Partion again
10. click the plus sign below it so you get the number of partitions you’ll need – twice to get 3 partitions, for example;
11. in order of partitions from first to last, use the circle chart to adjust the size of your partitions being careful to make the size match a whole number of Gb (I believe decimal parts lead to extra space between partitions which results in a messy disk); you can oversize the first and then type in a number to get it exactly what you want and then repeat for the next and so on
12. click on the partitions that will not be MacOS and change their Formats to to ExFAT (which we won’t use but is just here to not confuse the installer so there is only one APFS partition)
13. click Apply, click Partition
14. wait a while for it to finish (too bad you can’t partition as you format), click Done
15. quit Disk Utility

Okay, now the target disk is ready for the installation so it’s finally time to get MacOS installed.

16. select Install macOS, Continue
17. click ->
18. click ->, click Agree
19. select the MacOS drive click ->
20. installation starts – pay little attention to the number of minutes it claims is remaining – it should be about 10 minutes
21. when it reboots, be ready to hit F12 to select the boot device
22. choose the installer UFD again and boot from there
23. when the Clover boot loader comes up, select the choice named “Boot MacOS Install from MacOS” (not “Boot macOS Install from Install macOS Catalina”) and hit Enter
24. it boots showing verbose info, then gets to a black screen with the Apple logo and then reboots again, be ready to hit F12 to select the boot device again
25. when the Clover boot loader comes up, select the choice named “Boot MacOS Install from MacOS” (not “Boot macOS Install from Install macOS Catalina”) – same as last time – and hit Enter
26. it boots showing verbose info, then gets to a black screen with the Apple logo and a time estimate remaining (which is a somewhat accurate estimate – around 12 minutes), then it reboots and be ready to hit F12 to select the boot device
27. choose the installer UFD again and boot from there
28. this time when the Clover bootloader comes up, select the choice named “Boot macOS from MacOS”; setup starts
29. select the country and click ->
30. click ->
31. click ->
32. click ->
33. click Set Up Later, Skip
34. click ->, Agree
35. enter username and password, click ->
36. click Customize Settings
37. click -> , Don’t Use
38. click location on map, ->
39. uncheck Share Mac Analytics with Apple, ->
40. click Set Up Later
41. click ->
42. select Not Now, click ->
43. select the “look”, click ->
44. install of MacOS is complete, shows desktop
45. if you are asked about doing any Updates, select Later and Tomorrow

E. Post-MacOS-Install Tweaks

Great, so now MacOS is installed on the hard drive but the computer can’t yet boot on its own without the UFD. So we need to set up the hard drive the same way we did the UFD. And that’s why you copied over the additional tools to the UFD earlier. Note that the Command key may be the Alt key – we will fix that later.

To start, we will copy over the Clover Configurator to the Utilities folder.

1. make sure the Finder is in focus and use Cmd-Shift-U to open the Utilities folder in a Finder window
2. double click on the Install MacOS Catalina UFD on the desktop to open a Finder window
3. drag Clover Configurator from the USB drive to the Utilities folder, click Authenticate and enter your password
4. close the Finder window with the Utilities folder leaving the UFD window open

Now we need to install Clover on the hard drive.

5. In the UFD finder window, ctrl-click on the Clover pkg and select Open, and if it asks you about security, click the Open button
6. click Continue, enter password if asked, click Continue, click Continue
7. very important: click Change Install Location
8. choose MacOS drive (not the installer), Continue
9. click Install; enter password if asked; if you get a warning click “Install Anyway”
10. click the Close button to end the Clover bootloader installation

As when we were setting up the UFD installer, now the EFI folder is mounted and we’ll take advantage of that to move the files we want into place.

11. with the Finder in focus, hit Command-N to open a new Finder window and select the EFI volume in the sidebar, double click the EFI folder in that volume
12. move the BOOT and CLOVER folders in the EFI folder to the trash
13. in the UFD finder window, open the Bootpack folder and copy the BOOT and CLOVER folders to the EFI folder on the MacOS hard drive
14. if your computer has a 2nd graphics card that MacOS doesn’t recognize (like the R7 M370 on my E5570), copy the file named “SSDT-Disable-DGPU.aml” from in the UFD folder “for computers with second GPU” to the MacOS drive in EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched where the other aml files are
15. if your computer has a Thunderbolt port, copy the file named “SSDT-TBOLT3-KGP.aml” from in the UFD folder “for computers with Thunderbolt port” to the MacOS drive in EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched where the other aml files are
16. Eject the USB installer drive by clicking the eject icon next to the volume name in the sidebar and that UFD Finder window will close; remove the UFD from the computer

The computer is now capable of booting itself now but we are going to tweak a few things for the final install which we didn’t need to do when setting up the UFD.

17. in the Finder window open to the EFI volume, open the CLOVER folder and double click on the config.plist file – if everything has gone correctly so far, Clover Configurator will open
18. select Boot in the left sidebar and then select “-v” in the arguments box and hit the minus sign (tiny, to the right bottom of the boot arguments pane) to remove it; repeat to remove the debug and the keepsyms arguments too leaving only the “dart” argument; set the Timeout to 2 or whatever number of seconds you think is appropriate to choose which OS to boot up (deselect the “-1” if needed)
19. click GUI in the left sidebar and uncheck Enabled under Mouse if you don’t like the ugly large pointer (skip this step if you want to use the mouse in Clover); and select Linux scanning if you plan to install a Linux OS (selecting once will give a “-” which seems to work fine)
20. click SMBIOS in the left sidebar and then click the Generate New button next to the words Serial Number
21. click the save button (second from bottom left, arrow pointing off the document icon), and Save
22. Quit Clover Configurator

The boot set up is now in good shape. We just need have a few more setup tasks for the new computer. We’ll start with some terminal commands to create an SSDT file for the specific computer, copy it into place, and then prevent hibernation. Then there are just a few preference issues to follow up on.

23. open Terminal (Cmd-Shift-U to go to Utilities) and type the following and be prepared to enter your password at least once

cd Downloads
curl -o ssdtPRGen.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Piker-Alpha/ssdtPRGen.sh/Beta/ssdtPRGen.sh
chmod 755 ssdtPRGen.sh
sudo ./ssdtPRGen.sh
n
cp ~/Library/ssdtPRGen/ssdt.aml /Volumes/ESP/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched/
sudo pmset hibernatemode 0
sudo rm -f /var/vm/sleepimage
sudo pmset hibernatefile /dev/null

24. open System Preferences, select Keyboard, select Modifier Keys
25. swap the Command and Option keys
26. Restart to see the Mac boot on its own and confirm everything looks good (including translucent Dock)

If you had set up a partition for Time Machine, do the following

27. open System Preferences and select Time Machine
28. click Select Backup Disk, select the partition for Time Machine (based on size), click Use Disk, and click Erase

MacOS setup is now done!!

F. Getting Required Software for Windows

You can get the Windows 10 ISO a number of ways. The link below will bring you to a page where the ISO should be but if you do that on MacOS, it will be a pain to create the UFD Windows installer. And if you do that on a Windows computer, the page will redirect to a page where it wants to create a “Media Creation Tool” which is an annoying extra step. So the steps below make use of a clever technique to get the ISO downloadable on a Windows computer.

1. go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
2. if on Windows, it will bounce to the non-ISO page so do the following to bounce back to the ISO page (if not on Windows, skip to step 5)
3. open Developer Tools (F12) and then go to responsive mode (Ctrl+Shift+M), select iPad from list, refresh page with F5
4. it will then bring you to the ISO page, continue below
5. select Windows 10 and language
6. click the link that is the ISO download for appropriate version – usually 64-bit, save the file, wait to finish

G. Create the Windows 10 Installer UFD

Now we need to create a UFD installer like we did for MacOS. I prefer using the Rufus approach rather than the Windows Media Creation Tool because you have more control over it. I like that you can create the installer to work under both UEFI and Legacy. But I didn’t use Rufus to download the Windows ISO on the fly in case I didn’t end up with the right version, I wouldn’t have to do it over.

You are going to need another USB drive – this one can be 8 Gb or larger. It doesn’t need to be 16 Gb but I used a 16 since I bought a bunch of UFDs to be used as installers. And to use Rufus, you’ll need to do all of this on a computer already running Windows.

1. go to http://rufus.ie/
2. download Rufus version 3.11 to Downloads
3. insert blank UFD or one you don’t mind erasing (8 Gb or greater)
4. run Rufus from download location
5. in the Device dropdown, select the UFD to use
6. click select button to the right of boot selection and choose the ISO downloaded above
7. change partition scheme to MBR
8. hit Alt-E to enable cheat mode for both UEFI and Legacy (note that you will only do this once on the computer you are using for installation and that if you run again, the cheat mode is still enabled so hitting Alt-E will disable it); when you have this correct, you should see the Target system is “BIOS or UEFI”
9. change the Volume label to something like “Windows10Installer”
10. File system should be NTFS and leave cluster size as “Default”
11. click Start
12. when it’s done, the pop-up will warn you to disable secure boot and the “More information” button does have some interesting info that is worth reading; click Close
13. and click CLOSE to close Rufus

H. Install Windows 10

We already took care of the computer setup issues in section C above so we can move right on to installing Windows 10 on the target computer. The only weird part about this process is that the partition that we temporarily set up as ExFAT to be used for Windows during the MacOS partition process first needs to be deleted and then recreated. It feels like extra work but it seems to make the process go smoothly and it doesn’t take long at all here.

1. plug in the AC adapter and connect a network cable, insert UFD into a USB SS port on the target computer, and turn on computer
2. hit F12 to select the installer USB and boot (the boot list may include more choice than your recognize so you can try them until you get the right one)
3. on boot up, it might take a while and you can ignore any weird BIOS logo you see frozen and repeated on the screen
4. at Windows Setup, select language, time, and keyboard, Next
5. click Install Now
6. I accept, Next
7. click Custom: Install Windows only (advanced)
8. select the partition intended for Windows (based on size) and click Delete, click OK
9. select unallocated space where the partition was and click New, click Apply, click OK
10. with the newly created and formatted partition selected, click Next to install
11. gets files ready for installation (takes about 5 minutes)
12. when it reboots, it will boot up on its own fine – no need for F12 or any boot selection intervention
13. Windows will boot and show “Getting ready”
14. it will reboot again without needing intervention
15. “just a moment…”
16. select region, Yes
17. select keyboard, Yes, Skip
18. Set up for personal use, Next
19. select Offline Acount, then selected Limited Experience
20. enter username, Next
21. leave password blank, Next
22. turn off all privacy settings (tab and space bar work well for this), Accept
23. No
24. Not now
25. “Hi”, “We’re getting everything ready for you”, “This might take several minutes”, “Almost there”
26. install of Windows 10 is complete, shows desktop

I. Post-Windows-Install Tweak

There are a few minor tweaks to take care of after Windows finishes installing. The first tweak will make it so Windows and MacOS don’t fight about the time and time zone settings.

1. launch regedit (type regedit in bottom left box and hit enter)
2. navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
3. create a DWORD (32 bit) value, name it RealTimeIsUniversal. Set the value to 1.
4. Exit

You may want to leave Windows booted up for a while until it finishes automatically downloading stuff, updating stuff, etc.. And there may be reboots required as part of that downloading and updating.

J. Prepare Ubuntu Installer UFD

There are a number of ways to do this and plenty of guides out there. Since I’m doing this in a Mac-centric way, I followed a guide at itsfoss.com but use whichever guide works for your situation. You’ll need another USB flash drive and you only need 8 Gb for this one. The Ubuntu version I used for this install is 20.04 but you can use whichever version is available on the Ubuntu download page.

K. Install Ubuntu

This install is pretty easy overall and is for the most part the standard install. There’s only the one part about where to put the bootloader during the install that you need to pay attention to. Plug in the AC adapter and network cable before starting the steps below.

1. insert the Ubuntu UFD installer in a SS USB port and turn the computer on
2. hit F12 to get the boot device list and choose the UFD installer for Ubuntu and hit enter to boot from it
3. you’ll see the Dell BIOS logo come back and then the Ubuntu logo below it – it will say that it wants to check disks and you can just Ctrl-C right away to skip that (if you don’t catch it right away, you may have to wait for the whole check to complete)
4. after Ubuntu boots up, click the button to “Install Ubuntu”
5. select keyboard, Continue
6. select “Install third-party software…”, Continue
7. select “Something else”, Continue
8. select the temporary partition set up as ExFat above (determined by size) and click the minus button to delete it
9. select the free space where the temporary partition was and click the plus button to create it
10. leave the settings all as defaulted except change mount point to “/” (select it in the dropdown) and click OK
11. change device for boot loader installation to the one that is shown in the table as “Type” “efi” (if you installed Windows already, as above, it will also be named “Windows Boot Manager”)
12. click Install Now, review the warnings, click Continue
13. type in location, Continue
14. enter user, computer, and password info, click Continue
15. when installation finishes, click Restart Now
16. when told to, remove the USB drive and hit Enter
17. the computer reboots and does not need any intervention to boot back into Ubuntu
18. log in to your account – note that you will need to click the trackpad buttons and that “tap to click” isn’t working on the login screen – we’ll fix that next

L. Post Ubuntu Install Tweaks

There’s only one thing I’m aware of at this time that needs tweaking after installing Ubuntu and that’s to get the “tap-to-click” to work on the login screen.

1. click waffle on the lower left, search for Terminal, click on Terminal
2. right click on the Terminal icon in the left sidebar and select Add to Favorites
3. type the following in the Terminal window and enter your password when asked to do so:

sudo -i
xhost +SI:localuser:gdm
su gdm -s /bin/bash
export DISPLAY=:0
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true

And now Ubuntu is finished installing

M. Final Tweaks

At this point, you probably noticed that when you boot, the only choice is the last thing you installed, whether it be Windows or Linux. And if you hit F12, while you can see the others, the Mac OS X boot option doesn’t work. So we need to add a Clover boot option to the boot sequence to boot MacOS and it can work for Windows or Linux too. Skip these steps if you are only installing MacOS since booting should still be working from that installation.

1. reboot
2. hit F2 to get into BIOS settings
3. go to boot sequence
4. delete Mac OS X boot option by selecting it on the upper right and clicking Delete Boot Option
5. click Add Boot Option – name it Clover and click the “…” button to select /EFI/Clover/Cloverx64.efi (the one without a dot underscore at the beginning of the name)
6. select the new Clover entry and then use the arrow to move it to the top

Regardless of what has been installed before, we should put the BIOS settings back to the production settings rather than the temporary install settings. If you did the steps above, you are still in the BIOS settings but if you didn’t, start by rebooting and hit F2 to get into BIOS settings.

7. change the POST Fastboot to Auto
8. change the POST Extend Boot time to zero – if you want to – I left mine at 5 seconds
9. Apply, check Save as Custom User Settings, click OK
10. click Exit, computer reboots

Now when the computer boots, it will always start with Clover unless you use the F12 to select a different partition. And when in Clover, you can select either MacOS, Windows, or Ubuntu and they should now be able to boot from Clover.