[Gllug] Ubuntu

[James McGuigan]

Jeff Young wrote:
> Hi Simon
> 
> I think I have got some major decision to make because
> I have been trying Ubuntu on live cd and it is great
> but my laptop has made a patition to install SUSE 9.3
> using Patition Magic on windows XP already.
> 
> If I make another patition for ubuntu, would the grub
> handle another patition for ubuntu in a laptop?
> 
> is it safe to have triple boot in a system?
> 
> Please advise.

It is safe to run a triple boot system with multiple versions of linux at the same.
I'm running both Ubuntu and Gentoo on my own machine (no windows though :-) )

If it was FreeBSD and Linux on the same hard disk, I think there some extra steps
involved (as FreeBSD uses different partition types), but I have no experience with
this.

I assume that you have grub installed on a separate boot partition (though it should
be similar even if its not). Grub is a fairly small program that reads the config
file /boot/grub/menu.lst, will load one of the kernel images from the root directory
of the drive (usually mounted as /boot) and tell the kernel which partition the rest
of the system is in (ie /dev/hda2). With windows, grub uses a chainloader, which in
essence passes control to the windows bootloader (which in turn loads windows).

The major points in running multi-linux setup is that some of the automated package
management tools may not realise you have multiple installations and can overwrite
your custom settings in /boot/grub/menu.lst

Its best to keep a backup of the file (and possibly even a printout), and become
familiar with grub syntax (ie hd(0,0) => /dev/hda1). You may need to reenter these
details into the file.

Another bug you may encounter (maybe its just because my root partition is /dev/hdd8)
is the gub config tools mixing up your drive letters writing you hd(1,0) instead of
hd(0,0). The kernel will refuse to boot and you will be left with a grub command
prompt (click e to edit the line and it will boot fine - just remember to reedit your
menu.lst file after the boot)

The other potential problem is if the two distros use the same naming convention for
their kernel images, there is the potential for them to overwrite each others
kernels. If the kernel depends on modules within the filesystem and you boot the
other distros kernel, then it may cause problems when it cannot find the modules. A
workaround would be to simply rename the kernel image files (and associated files) to
something unique (ie Ubuntu-vmlinux-2.6.12-9-k7-smp) and then update your
/boot/grub/menu.lst file with the new filenames.


If the home directory is mounted on a separate partition, then it can be shared (edit
your /etc/fstab file accordingly). But we warned that some programs (like KDE)
dislike config files from different versions (ie kde3.3 vs kde3.4) so be use to run
the same version on both distros (I usually find its easier to backup my settings,
remove them and reapply the bits I need when upgrading KDE).


-- 
Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason,
But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines,
And live their lives governed not by rules but by reason.
     - James McGuigan

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