Dual booting: Ubuntu LTS and openSUSE 12.1

[LinuxIsOne]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Pongo A. Pan <pongo_pan at fastmail.us>wrote:

Partitioning is a big subject and the best way to learn about it is to
> play around with Patrick Verner's Parted Magic (FOSS from
> www.partedmagic.com) on a test-bed computer.
>
> I made my current testing setup with a 1 TB and a 500 GB hard disk with
> all of the 1 TB disk in an extended partition, divided into several
> virtual partitions for data, encrypted data,
> compressed-old-data-I'll-likely-never-need-again, etc..  The 500 GB disk
> has a primary partition for swap and the rest is an extended partition
> with four virtual partitions for the four distros I'm currently
> evaluating, four fairly small /home partitions, and a comfortably large
> partition for /tmp which is shared among them.  I find it is easier to
> do this before I install anything; the partitioning utilities which come
> with installers vary in quality and understandability; Partition Magic
> is easy and terrific.
>
> I made descriptive labels for each partition.  This helps when
> modifying /etc/fstab.  All of this is super easy with Parted Magic.  It
> helps to have a printed list of your partitions when working: "parted
> --list > parts.list" makes a file you can print out.
>
> Then I installed the distros, being careful to assign *everything* to a
> mount point: e.g., when installing Ubuntu, I assigned the root
> directories of Sabayon, SUSE, and Mint to mount points
> like /sabsys, /susesys and /mintsys and the corresponding homes to mount
> points like /sabhome, /susehome, and /minthome.  This way the roots and
> homes of each are available to all of the others. I share a /tmp without
> apparent problems.  I also assign mount points to my various /data
> partitions on the 1TB disk.  To avoid having to mess with fstab, prevent
> each installation from re-formatting its / partition as this changes the
> UUID!
>
> Distros using grub 2 find each other and co-exist happily.  As it
> happens, I installed openSUSE last in this case and simply told it to
> use no boot loader at all and then ran update-grub from Ubuntu later to
> add it to the boot menu.  I use the grub version from Ubuntu in the boot
> tracks of the first hard disk since right now it seems to work the best:
> "grub-install /dev/sda" will do it.
>
> The rest is easy: remove directories like Music, Documents and .mozilla
> from the /home/yourname folder and symlink them to the correspondingly
> named directories in your common data partition for each distro.
> Something like "ln -s /data/.mozilla" does it.  You can use the same
> log-on name and UID for each distro without conflicts.  Be aware though
> that some distros still start UIDs at 500 not 1000 (looking at you,
> Fedora), so watch for this.
>
> At some point you may want to change the setup.  This means you will
> have to learn the fine points of modifying fstab in each distro and
> using the blkid program to get the UUIDs for partitions.
>
> There are other ways to do this, probably better and more elegant ways,
> but this works for me.  Needless to say, this is not a computer I do
> anything vital on.  Happily, I've perfected my utility of futility to
> the point that I'm not expected to do anything important anyway.
>

Would have to understand all this..... a lot! Try......

Thanks
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