It’s been a few years since I put anything other than Mac OS X on a Mac, but I really don’t remember it being this hard. I’ve got a Core 2 Duo MacBook, a packaged copy of openSuSE 11.0, and a 240GB FireWire HD. The goal is to get a bootable installation of openSuSE on the external drive, leaving OS X (relatively) unmolested on the internal.
The best luck I’ve had involved prepping the drive with an MBR partition scheme, at which point the installation went without a hitch, the automatic reboot went fine, I used the system for a while, and then switched back to OS X. An hour later when I tried to get back to SuSE it wouldn’t boot again. I probably left out one relatively simple thing, but no idea what.
Looking around a bit, I can’t even really find confirmation that this is doable, let alone how, but that seems unlikely. Does someone have a fairly explicit, assume-nothing set of directions for getting at least close to where I want to go?