iHeresy - Win7 on MacBook Pro
I never thought I'd ever own an Apple computer. Now I do, but still the Apple OS doesn't really cut it for what I have to do for work. Hence, shortly after it's arrival, I went looking for some chicken blood, scented candles and a mysterious black robe: ready to perform the iHeresy and install Windows 7 on the brand new MacBook Pro!
Thanks to Apple, the heretical procedure is quite easy: the Snow Leopard installation disc you get with your Mac contains all Windows drivers you'll need and Mac OSX itself can do the partitioning work for you and setup the EFI bootloader correctly. In most cases the official installation guide will be perfectly fine to install Windows on a Mac PC.
However, if you'd like to setup a triple boot with Mac OSX, Windows and Linux, you'll need a more advanced solution: rEFIt, a toolkit that lets you customize the bootloader and boot from almost everything. Just download the latest package and install it in Mac OSX (it's a simple .dmg package). Refit won't show up as an installed application, but at the next reboot it should already show up instead of the gray Apple logo.
Now you're ready to partition your Apple's hard disk and install any other operating system. To do so, I suggest this great guide (which is slightly outdated, but nonetheless valid and very detailed). Essentially you'll have to follow this three steps...
Partition the hard disk
Do not use the Boot Camp utility to do so, but use the diskutil application from a terminal. Launching diskutil list should yield a list of partitions on your main drive (that is, the EFI bootloader partition and the Mac OSX partition). Find out the ID of your Mac OSX partition (should be number 2 by default) and then resize it by launching the following command:
sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 92G "Linux" "Linux" 40G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows" 92GThe disk0s2 tells the resizer to alter the second partition on the first disk. The first parameter 92G will resize the selected partition (your Mac OSX partition) to that size, while the following list of partitions (format: "type" "name" size) will create new partitions with the remaining space. Make sure that the total size does not exceed the original size of the resized partition.
Also note that you'll have to set "MS-DOS FAT32" as the type of your Windows partition, even if you're then going to reformat the partition with NTFS.
Install Windows 7
Now reboot and insert your Windows disk. Refit should show a new entry (legacy boot on removable drive, or something like that). Boot from the disk and perform a standard installation. Pick the right partition and reformat it using the NTFS file system.
As soon as Windows 7 starts, you'll have to install the MacBook Pro drivers that you can find on the original Snow Leopard disk. Afterwards you'll be able to install updated drivers from the Apple website.
Install Linux
Reboot again and insert your Linux distro disk: install it as usual and remember to manually select the correct target partition. In my case, Ubuntu 10.04 plastered Grub over the Windows 7 bootloader and therefore selecting Windows and Linux in rEFIt always brings you back to the Grub bootloader. Anyway, if you're able to do so, install Grub to the Linux partition and leave Windows alone (rEFIt will boot directly to it).
For more detail, refer to the original article that accurately describes every step you need to make.
Customize rEFIt
The official rEFIt website doesn't go into much detail about the bootloader customization: what you have to do is to boot Mac OSX and then edit the /efi/refit/refit.conf file using vim or nano. The file contains detailed descriptions of every option and is pretty straightforward to edit: you can, for instance, remove some boot drives, select the default boot option, change the timeout or also alter some of the graphical elements.
After saving the file, the changes will be applied during the next reboot. Remember to save a backup copy of the original configuration file before making any changes.
That's all, the blasphemous Windows installation ritual is done. Now you can enjoy your MacBook Pro with your favorite operating system. 
