Fwd: Howto setup dual Ubuntu - LinuxMint system

[alain.muls at telenet.be]

Hi All

A couple of months ago, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (currently updated to final version) on /dev/sda6. The grub2 bootloader is installed on the MBR of /dev/sda while /dev/sda4 holds my home partition.

I also kept a blank partition allowing to play around with other distributions.
This week I installed LinuxMint on /dev/sda5 and made sure it wrote its bootloader onto /dev/sda5.

Booting back to Ubuntu I ran update-grub2 which detected the both OSes. I have all Ubuntu kernels and at the bottom I have the LinuxMint kernels.

I would like to change this in the following way:
- have on the MBR /dev/sda a menu with the selection of Ubuntu or LinuxMint (so just 2 entries)
- selecting either one directs to the corresponding bootloader on the root device for the partition (sda6 for Ubuntu and sda5 for LinuxMint)
How can you do this with the grub2 which is compeltely new for me (I had a similar setup with grub previously)


Also both systems use gnome but with a layout tailored either by Ubuntu or by LinuxMint. Now the "gnome" dirs with the configuration get overwritten when I switch from one to the other and therefor the layout of the gnome specifics get messed up. I would want to avoid that by having eg a specific dir (eg gnome.Ubuntu and gnome.Linuxmint) which would be linked at boot according to the system that boots. 
Can this be done and if so, which specific gnome dirs OR gnome config files do I have to setup like this?

Tx/Alain