Re: [gentoo-user] How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 2/26/24 04:57, gentoo-u...@krasauskas.dev wrote: You could also write a script that keeps all the distros up to date from within whichever one you're currently booted by mounting subvolumes to /mnt or wherever, chrooting in and running the update. To avoid grub not being able to point to a newly updated kernel on one of the OS's installed, I use a "custom.cfg" file in all my /boot/grub/ directories for each OS where the "linix" and "initrd" point to the symbolic links of the kernel and init files which point to the newly updated files on most major distributions like ubuntu, arch, suse, and debian. The name of the symbolic links stay the same over upgrades. It works great when using UUID to identify the partition that has root and I can always boot into any of the OS's installed no matter which one hijacked the MBR. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=315584
Re: [gentoo-user] How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
Since this is a fairly custom task, I would approach it with a custom
solution.
- GPT
- systemd-boot
- One /boot partition
- One BTRFS-on-LUKS partition (formatted using the distro with the
oldest kernel)
- {@root,@home,@var,@srv,@opt}-{distro1,distro2,distro3} subvolumes
- Potentially {@distro1,distro2,distro3}-{downloads,documents,pictures}
subvolumes, if there's a usecase for that
- Bootstrap all the distros manually. Arch and Gentoo do that by
default, debian land has debootstrap, not too familiar with rhel
universe, but at the end of the day everything's a file :)
You could also write a script that keeps all the distros up to date
from within whichever one you're currently booted by mounting
subvolumes to /mnt or wherever, chrooting in and running the update.
You could also replace systemd-boot with efibootmgr to use UEFI boot
directly, but I would advise doing that after the everything is working
correctly as it's much easier to experiment using a good old bootloader
edit function.
BTRFS requires _some_ maintenance, but imho it's reasonable - run a
deduplication and defrag job on a scheduling tool of your choice and
you're good to go!
$0.02
Re: [gentoo-user] How to set up drive with many Linux distros?
On 22/02/2024 19:17, Grant Edwards wrote: However, the choice to install bootloaders in partitions instead of the MBR has been removed from most (all?) of the common installers. This forces me to jump through hoops when installing a new Linux distro: File a bug! If that's true, it basically borks any sort of dual boot, unusual disk layout, whatever. Last time I installed SUSE, it trashed my boot totally because it didn't recognise my disk stack, failed to load necessary drivers, and worse trashed my gentoo boot too ... Cue one big rescue job to get the system up and working again. At least it was only the boot that was trashed. Cheers, Wol
