28 Apr
2009
28 Apr
'09
6:01 p.m.
small history,
I am using Ubuntu Studio for a year now, and with the release of 9.04
Jaunty, I decided to do a clean install of it.
As for a long time a wanted to try Studio64, I decided to partition my hard
disk and install that as well (Studio64 2.1)
I also like and need Frescobaldy, but I just couldn't install it on a Debian
platform, so I decided to make one more partition and install Open Suse
11.1.
Finally, I made one more partition for future OS tests and one partition for
the files.
All in all, on my 500gb hard disk I created 6 partitions and installed the
OS's in the following order:
50gb partition 1 : Ubuntu Studio
50gb partition 2: Open Suse
50gb partition 3: Studio64
50gb partition 4: empty
180gb partition 5: files
20gb partition 6: swap
Now, of course, every OS created it's own boot loader and when I finally
installed Studio64, although it recognised the other OS's, and gave me the
option to boot into them, a Grub error 12 would appear (no files).
Browsing Forums, I bumped across Grub Super Disk and I am able to boot into
every single OS from there. But alas, I am not literate enough to create a
valid menu.lst on the master boot record.
I would appreciate any hints or (links to) simple and clear instructions on
the net. I am ready to reinstall all the OS's if needed. I start to
understand that a small separate /boot partition would be very useful, but I
don't have a clue how to set it up.
Viktor
28 Apr
28 Apr
7:09 p.m.
New subject: Multiple Linux Operating Systems on Grub, Help or Info appreciated
2009/4/28 Viktor Mastoridis <viktor(a)mastoridis.co.uk>uk>:
small history,
I am using Ubuntu Studio for a year now, and with the release of 9.04
Jaunty, I decided to do a clean install of it.
As for a long time a wanted to try Studio64, I decided to partition my hard
disk and install that as well (Studio64 2.1)
I also like and need Frescobaldy, but I just couldn't install it on a Debian
platform, so I decided to make one more partition and install Open Suse
11.1.
Finally, I made one more partition for future OS tests and one partition for
the files.
All in all, on my 500gb hard disk I created 6 partitions and installed the
OS's in the following order:
50gb partition 1 : Ubuntu Studio
50gb partition 2: Open Suse
50gb partition 3: Studio64
50gb partition 4: empty
180gb partition 5: files
20gb partition 6: swap
Now, of course, every OS created it's own boot loader and when I finally
installed Studio64, although it recognised the other OS's, and gave me the
option to boot into them, a Grub error 12 would appear (no files).
Browsing Forums, I bumped across Grub Super Disk and I am able to boot into
every single OS from there. But alas, I am not literate enough to create a
valid menu.lst on the master boot record.
I would appreciate any hints or (links to) simple and clear instructions on
the net. I am ready to reinstall all the OS's if needed. I start to
understand that a small separate /boot partition would be very useful, but I
don't have a clue how to set it up.
Viktor
Simplistically speaking it's a non-issue to have multiple Linux OS's
on the same system, either on the same drive or even on separate
drives. Each is accessed through an entry in grub.conf. In my
experience you have to watch out for the following sort of issues:
1) Keep each system completely independent on different partitions.
Simplistically, if everything under / for each system resides in its
own / partition, which it sounds like you've done, or if you are
careful to create separate partitions for each distros /var directory
for instance, then you can have multiple partitions for each distro.
It's just important that each distro point only at partitions that it
is using. It sounds like you've done that so reinstalls should not be
required - only possibly edits in each distro's fstab files.
2) To protect each distro in each distro's fstab file make sure you
only mount the partitions appropriate for that distro. Don't mount
Debian's /var partition when running Suse, etc.
3) To share your user data between distros it's fine to have a single
/home partition that is used by all distros, but it has to be done
carefully and it likely will not be correct immediately after the
install. Different distros will give different users unique user and
group IDs so you need to make sure they are all made identical when
using useradd and other tools like that. None the less when they are
correctly set I've not had any trouble with Fedora reading my Gentoo
/home/mark directory, etc. I can log on as mark in any installation
and they all see the same files.
4) You can use grub from any modern distro to boot all distro's that
you've installed.
5) In grub.conf you'll have different kernel command lines based on
what disk you are booting off of pointing at the right partition.
Other than that grub will look very normal.
Hope this helps,
Mark
11:37 p.m.
New subject: Multiple Linux Operating Systems on Grub, Help or Info appreciated
Viktor Mastoridis wrote:
small history,
I am using Ubuntu Studio for a year now, and with the release of 9.04
Jaunty, I decided to do a clean install of it.
As for a long time a wanted to try Studio64, I decided to partition my
hard disk and install that as well (Studio64 2.1)
I also like and need Frescobaldy, but I just couldn't install it on a
Debian platform, so I decided to make one more partition and install
Open Suse 11.1.
Finally, I made one more partition for future OS tests and one partition
for the files.
All in all, on my 500gb hard disk I created 6 partitions and installed
the OS's in the following order:
50gb partition 1 : Ubuntu Studio
50gb partition 2: Open Suse
50gb partition 3: Studio64
50gb partition 4: empty
180gb partition 5: files
20gb partition 6: swap
Now, of course, every OS created it's own boot loader and when I finally
installed Studio64, although it recognised the other OS's, and gave me
the option to boot into them, a Grub error 12 would appear (no files).
Browsing Forums, I bumped across Grub Super Disk and I am able to boot
into every single OS from there. But alas, I am not literate enough to
create a valid menu.lst on the master boot record.
I would appreciate any hints or (links to) simple and clear instructions
on the net. I am ready to reinstall all the OS's if needed. I start to
understand that a small separate /boot partition would be very useful,
but I don't have a clue how to set it up.
Viktor
Hello Viktor,
The process is quite simple, once you understand how the parts
inter-relate. And I do this without a separate /boot partition.
1. Go into the last operating system you installed, Studio64 if I
understood you correctly.
2. Make a directory for each operating system you wish to boot into.
such as:
/UbuntuStudio
/OpenSuse
in the directory structure of your Studio64 system.
3. Edit the File System Table file, called fstab. You should find it
as /etc/fstab.
Specify the partions for UbuntuStudio and OpenSuse and have them
mounted to /UbuntuStudio and /OpenSuse.
4. Reboot your Studio64 system so that the changes to /etc/fstab will
be implemented.
5. You should now be able to change to the /UbuntuStudio directory
under Studio64 and look at the /grub directory for UbuntuStudio. This
will tell you which files you will need to reference in the Studio64
grub menu.lst file or grub.conf file. Do the same thing for the
/OpenSuse directory.
6. Edit the Studio64 /grub directory menu.lst file or grub.conf or
whatever it's called.
Here's what I used to do when I was running Fedora and OpenSuse. Add
the appropriate lines for the kernels you wish to boot.
It's very important to comment out any "hiddenmenu" grub command.
I've done that with #hiddenmenu below. The "timeout" grub command
allows you the specified number of seconds you have in which to choose
a Linux system to load. If you make no choice, then the "default"
system is loaded.
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this
file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda1
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
#hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/sda1 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img
title openSUSE 10.2 (2.6.18.8-0.5-default)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-0.5-default root=/dev/sda5
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18.8-0.5-default
Then to make life easier for yourself, boot into UbuntuStudio system
and make directories for /OpenSuse and /Studio64. Update the
/etc/fstab file for UbuntuStudio so that when you reboot into
UbuntuStudio you can see all the files in the OpenSuse system and the
Studio64 system.
Do the same procedure for the OpenSuse system.
Now, no matter what operating system you are in (as root), you can see
all the files in the other systems. I think it's a very good idea to
have the /Data directory in all the systems as well. This was the way
I was able to share linux data with a Windows95 partition I also had
set up. Just like with the other linux systems, Grub could boot into
the Windows system. You just had to install Windows first, then
install the linux systems.
A final suggestion: I don't know why you would need a 20GB of Swap
partition. I've got 1GB of memory and a 30GB hard drive. I am
running without a Swap partition at all. I've rarely seen more than
500MB of my 1GB of memory being used at any one time. If you like,
make your Swap partition 2 times your memory size, but no more. A
thought.
Best,
Stephen.
29 Apr
29 Apr
4:23 a.m.
New subject: Multiple Linux Operating Systems on Grub, Help or Info appreciated
I don't know what all the information flying around is about, but all you
need is one separate, universal /boot partition to hold the kernel images
and related files. This should've been created with the first distro
installation. GRUB must be re-edited and re-installed to MBR after the final
distro is set up.
How to manage the different systems falls entirely on the primary menu.lst
and the hdx,y with the sda lines. The hdx,y will be same for all of the
entries; it specifies where to look for the image and this is the /boot
created earlier. If it was sda1, then it'd be hd0,0. If it was sdb6, then
hd1,5. So on so forth. The sda/hda lines will be different for every entry
because it refers to the root partition.
Since you already are booting well, but you just want to re-order the list,
look at which of the menu.lst resembles the menu and edit it. After that,
install it to the MBR.
8:08 a.m.
New subject: Multiple Linux Operating Systems on Grub, Help or Info appreciated
Viktor Mastoridis wrote:
small history,
I would appreciate any hints or (links to) simple and clear instructions
on the net. I am ready to reinstall all the OS's if needed. I start to
understand that a small separate /boot partition would be very useful,
but I don't have a clue how to set it up.
The manual for Sidux is getting bigger quite quickly, try:
http://manual.sidux.com/en/sys-admin-grub-bootman2-en.htm#what-is-grub
That should help you understand Grub, your latest install probably set
Grub to look in it's /boot directory, so that is the menu.lst that it is
currently working from, but this manual tells you how to change that and
gives some background.
Sidux is a distribution which sticks very closely to Sid [the most
current version of Debian] but holds back or tweaks some packages which
are not behaving, they keep a small repository of these debs, and a
warnings noticeboard, but otherwise use the Sid repositories so a
dist-upgrade keeps you up-to-date as often as you wish.
I've had good luck with it installing on new machines, it has its own
kernel or you can use the current Sid one, and switch reasonable easily
between them. There is an audio group working in Sidux.
Simon
5688
days inactive
5689
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
4 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
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Mark Knecht -
Ray Rashif -
Simon Wise -
TheOther -
Viktor Mastoridis