On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:34:53PM -0400, Greg M. Johnson wrote: > I attempted to set up a four-distro installation on a computer.? I set > up about eight different partitions, including a 1Gb /boot.? There was > also one /home, a swap, and a bunch of? 10Gb partitions.? I paid > little heed to whether things were logical or extended partitions.?? I > went through the installation four times, putting a different distro > (Fedora, OpenSUSE, kubuntu, ubuntustudio)? with it's? "/" in a > different 10Gb partition. > > I ultimately failed to get a multi-boot system.? For most of the > distro installations, there was a warning suggesting that I was > mistaken in choosing not to format the /boot partition.? For Fedora > (which I installed first), it seemed to have a very intelligent > approach to the unused partitions and asked me to name them for the > /boot's sake. (IIRC). > > Q: Any tips on how to go about this?
1) Your boot partition only needs to be a hundred meg or so. 2) For each distro, do NOT install to the MBR. Pick the option to install the bootloader to that distributions partition only. (This will only work for distributions which are on primary partitions, as far as I know, but it's possible Grub will do some magic for you) 3) Set up grub as a chainloader (google, also see http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/grub/html_chapter/grub_4.html and look at the section on booting windows from grub via chainloading, the procedure should work the same to load the bootloader on the distributions partition). That's the simplest way to deal with it - let each distro manage its boot environment and kernel local to its own partition, and use one grub on the MBR controlled by your primary install. The alternate, which I do not recommend, is more like what you tried to do. In this case, you're putting multiple distribution kernels on one partition, which may lead to file name overlaps and kernels being rewritten. Each distro has its own kernel and will probably be very unhappy if you overwrite it with another distributions kernel. In this case, you must configure grub manually using the primary distribution and configure each kernel as a separate grub, loading the kernel from the /boot drive and setting home to be the appropriate other drive. Upgrading kernels inside your multiple distributions probably will not work, you'll have to unpack the installs and rename the kernel files to prevent collisions, and manually update your grub boot.lst for each distro. -m -- Mike Kershaw/Dragorn <[email protected]> GPG Fingerprint: 3546 89DF 3C9D ED80 3381 A661 D7B2 8822 738B BDB1 There's too much blood in my caffeine system!
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