Greetings,
Some of you said that they would like to hear about my experience of
running three (by now four) distributions on one machine.
All distributions I use are 64-bit. My first setup after the installfest
included Gentoo and SuSE. Then I installed Debian and copied SuSE to an
external harddrive. I only have 40Gb on my main drive. After all it is a
laptop I am using. Debian was quite nice but I have not received any
updates for three months or so. The day before yesterday I transfered it
to the external drive as well and installed Ubuntu instead.
Unfortunately I can not boot from the external drive. I use
init-scripts, mount --bind and then chroot to switch to another
distribution. I attached two sample scripts. Both go into /etc/init.d.
The script called Debian goes to the Gentoo installation and makes
Debian be usable from there and vice versa. Both assume that the
partition with Debian/Gentoo is mountable under /data/[distro]. After
executing the script one can use chroot /data/Gentoo. I made aliases for
this: chdeb, chubu, chsus and chgen. I added the line .
/data/Gentoo/etc/profile to all profiles. I also modified PS1 so that it
shows the distribution I am in.
Is there any use in this?
Yes, some. acroread works best under SuSE. (chroot /data/suse acroread
$PWD/$1). Some important part in pango is broken in Gentoo. Because of
this many Gnome appications (gnome-panels, nautilus, gedit &c.) do not
work there. They do however work under Ubuntu and Debian. I use Ubuntu
if I have some issue with my configuration. It is in many respects
easier than Gentoo. If there is something severely wrong with Gentoo or
Ubuntu I do not need to use Knoppix to fix it but can use the other
distribution for that. xine can also decode wma only under debian out of
the box, so I copied some files over to Gentoo and now it works under
both distributions. ATI-drivers are easier to set up there although
there are more games under the other distributions. (I could continue
this list for some time.)
My two favorite distributions are Gentoo and Ubuntu. Gentoo is up to
date and fast. Ubuntu is easy to use, yet because it uses apt very
powerfull. It has also the by far best grahical design ;) and is the
only distribution on which kde and Gnome both work well (after apt-get
install kubuntu-desktop kubuntu-default-settings).
Happy Hacking,
Robert Himmelmann
#!/sbin/runscript
#depend() {
#}
start() {
ebegin "Starting Debian Emulation"
mount /data/debian 2> /dev/null
mount --bind /dev /data/debian/dev
mount --bind /tmp /data/debian/tmp
mount --bind /proc /data/debian/proc
mount --bind /home /data/debian/home
mount --bind /root /data/debian/root
mount --bind / /data/debian/data/gentoo
mount --bind /data/stuff /data/debian/data/stuff
eend 0
}
stop() {
ebegin "Stoping Debian Emulation"
umount /data/debian/dev
umount /data/debian/tmp
umount /data/debian/proc
umount /data/debian/home
umount /data/debian/root
umount /data/debian/data/gentoo
umount /data/debian/data/stuff
umount /data/debian
eend $?
}
#!/bin/sh
#depend() {
#}
start() {
echo "Starting Gentoo Emulation"
mount /data/gentoo 2> /dev/null
mount --bind /dev /data/gentoo/dev
mount --bind /tmp /data/gentoo/tmp
mount --bind /proc /data/gentoo/proc
mount --bind /home /data/gentoo/home
mount --bind /root /data/gentoo/root
mount --bind / /data/gentoo/data/debian
mount --bind /data/stuff /data/gentoo/data/stuff
return 0
}
stop() {
echo "Stoping Gentoo Emulation"
umount /data/gentoo/dev
umount /data/gentoo/tmp
umount /data/gentoo/proc
umount /data/gentoo/home
umount /data/gentoo/root
umount /data/gentoo/data/debian
umount /data/gentoo/data/stuff
umount /data/gentoo
return $?
}
case "$1" in
start)
start || exit $?
;;
stop)
stop || exit $?
;;
restart)
stop
start || exit $?
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/wvdial start/stop/restart"
;;
esac
