Just for fun, I'm trying out a whole bunch of different Linux distributions, to compare them to see which I like best.
I have an old PC with a 13GB drive with Mandrake 9.0 installed. This drive is /dev/hda. /dev/hda6 is the swap space. I have added a 250GB drive (/dev/hdb) and created about 20 partitions. I made /dev/hdb1 a primary partition of 1GB size, and called it boot. hdb5-hdb23 are each 12GB logical partitions, intended to try various distros. hdb24 is a 21GB partition to be a (shared across distro) home drive. All of these are ext3 partitions. I've set hdb5-23 (all the "distro-drives", if I can call them that) to have a different forced-fsck count based on the number of times it's been mounted, not based on the number of days since last boot. In contrast, the home partition is set to have a forced-fsck time based on days, since it will be shared. I have also given a disk label to each "distro-drive" - e.g. the mandrake one has a label of MANDRAKE and I've changed its fstab to mount LABEL=MANDRAKE to /. Anyway, my real question is, what's a good way to set up the boot process? If I'm going to have say about 12 different distros, what's a good way to do this. Normally I just install the system into its own partition, and set up suitable mount points so each system can see the others, and use lilo, and add an entry for each kernel I want to boot up. That's going to be a bit painful, since I'll have to copy the /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf to each system, with appropriate tweaks to the lilo.conf on each one for its root ... wait, no, I can use a symlink of / to, say, /fedora on the fedora system or / to /mandrake on the mandrake system, so I can in fact use the same lilo.conf on each. (At least, if I leave /boot within /, not a separately mounted filesystem.) Then I only have one line in each fstab to change (the root mount point). But I was initially thinking if I put all the kernels into a separate /boot partition, it'd all be much easier. The trouble is that each distro is going to assume that /boot belongs to it, and feel free to overwrite vmlinuz and System.map etc. I just now finished a Ubuntu install. It installs Grub as the boot loader (no option not to). I was pleased to see that it detected Mandrake 9 installed on another partition and offered to keep that and add the Ubuntu as an alternative boot, so I let it do that. Unfortunately the system now fails to boot (GRUB loading stage 1.5 and leads to Error 21). I wasn't going to use Grub since I don't know of a way to check that a grub config is correct, except to reboot to see what happens. SO I can't say I'm surprised. While lilo is less powerful than grub, it seems much safer. You always know where you stand. Anyway, I'll rescue the system and re-install lilo into the MBR and then proceed. But any suggestions to make this easier would be welcome. FWIW, the systems I'm planning to install are Ubuntu, Fedora core 4, knoppix, gnoppix, debian, yos, slackware 10.2, xandros, linspire, maybe lycoris and maybe gentoo too. BTW, is there a good graphical installer for debian? I got halfway through installing it in a text installer when it presented me with the configuration of ALL the kernel modules in text mode, and at that point I scrubbed it and moved on to install Mandrake 9 instead. (Yes, I know Ubuntu is Debian, but I meant a vanilla debian with point and click install.) luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
