On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 07:25, Joel Hammer wrote:
> Can you not edit /etc/lilo from any partition, and  run lilo with the -C or

Ayup. Been there dun that, got the bloodstained Tshirt.

The location of lilo.conf AND the location of /boot AND the lilo version 
are the keys to all this. It matters not _which_ lilo.conf and _which_ /boot 
you choose to use as the seed.

Each distro will have it's own /etc/lilo.conf, and it's own /boot 
directory. You need to make it singular, unitary, one only.

1) You need to move lilo.conf into _a_ /boot directory
1a) move /sbin/lilo into the same directory (matters not which distro). You 
need to do this because lilo is signatured, you _sometimes_ get 
incompatibilities between different distro-lilos and the files they rely on 
in /boot

2) From all distros, you need to type the magic words forever more

/boot/lilo -C /boot/lilo.conf

2a) all distros specified in lilo conf MUST be mounted prior (so using 
/mnt/somewhere is quite sensible). You can use the keyword 'variable' in 
lilo.conf to ignore unmounted partitions see man lilo.

3)
You need to make a single, common, one only, /boot directory

The cleanest solution is to make it a partition (of about 0.5 meg*distros)

Short of left knee over toehold hoop jumping, this is not always possible 
because it is a good idea (tm) to make the /boot directory the first 
partition on the drive as lilo, and the motherboard, get upset with 8gig 
limits. Reorganising partitions is for the brave of heart.

So, a less clean solution is decide which of your 999 distros will be 'the' 
boot directory and symlink all other distros to that mounted partition

eg in elx

rm -rf /boot # after saving of course
ln -s /mnt/rh71/boot /boot
chmod  777 /mnt/rh71/boot

(chmod because you don't know the owner/group peculiarites of any given 
distro)

4) you can merge the contents of all /boot/kernel images into this single 
/folder because all distros tend to call them different names.  If they 
don't, then rename them yourself.
---
The assumption is that you choose to use the /boot folder on the redhat 
distro AND, all distros will mount the redhat partition as /mnt/rh71. Add 
salt and pepper to suit your situation.

/etc/fstab can be a dog. Essentially you are keeping slightly altered copies 
of each one / per distro. The solution to this can be to remove all 
extraneous partition mounts from all the fstabS and write a mounting script 
in /boot. You call this script via /etc/rc.local of each distro. That way, 
you only have a single script to alter, regardless of the number of distros 
and OS's you add/remove.

-- 
http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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