Multi-booting ubuntu installations (Was: Using VMWare for Dapper
testing)
Stephen Shirley
diamond+ubuntu-devel at nonado.net
Tue Nov 29 22:31:20 GMT 2005
Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> computer; as long as you are willing to (double-triple-quad)-boot your
> computer, something usually quite easy to do with the current
> installer.
Not so much really. If you want grub to be able to update the menu.lst
for all ubuntu installations, you need to do something like:
- install grub into the mbr, with one entry per os, which chainloads the
os's bootloader
- install grub into the os's partition
While that's not all that complicated, it's still not something the
installer can handle (unless i've somehow missed it...).
Where things get even worse is when you (like me ,-) use LVM for all
your linux partitions, and use a common non-LVM /boot, shared between
all ubuntu installs (i usually have about 3-4 on my laptop, for
testing). The sane solution here is to cheat slightly. I made a small
patch for grub with allows me to do this (from a virgin install):
mv /boot /mnt/boot/$ubuntu-ver/
ln -s /mnt/boot/$ubuntu-ver /boot
The patch tells grub that it should use /$ubuntu-ver/vmlinuz-etc... as
the kernel path rather than /vmlinuz-etc... when updating menu.lst. I
then install grub to the /boot partition, make it active, and have a
conf that has a:
title $ubuntu-ver
configfile /$ubuntu-ver/grub/menu.lst
entry per ubuntu install. It works quite well. If anyone else is
actually interested in the patch, i'm happy to make it available, but
i'm not holding my breath ,-)
Steve
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