[Techtalk] Booting multiple distros on one machine

[Akkana]

Mandi writes:
> The initial lilo screen is a lilo.conf option.  The way mandrake has been
> putting this together is the link you see in /boot.  Change the link for
> /boot/lilo to point to /boot/lilo-menu and rerun /sbin/lilo.  That should
[other useful information]

That reminds me of a problem I've been wanting to solve.  I like to be
able to check out other distros now and then -- drop in the latest when
they come out and see how well they work.  It's easy to make a bunch of
root partitions on my disk, and install different distros in each.  But
what's the best way to make them share lilo information?  And what do
you do about /boot -- separate partition, or part of root?  And can lilo
and grub coexist?  I'm sure I'm not the only person who multi-boots;
I'd be interested to hear what strategies other people are using.

I've found that lilo versions from different distros don't play together
very well.  I tried having one /boot partition for the multiple roots,
but when I ran Mandrake's lilo on a /boot that had been created by
Redhat, lilo complained (problems with initrd version, I think it was).

What I'm doing right now: multiple roots, /boot is just a directory in
each root filesystem.  One distro (currently Redhat 7.2) is the "master
distro", the one I use most of the time, and its lilo.conf knows about
kernels that exist on the /boot directories of the other distros.
So if I run lilo from Redhat, I first have to mount /suse and /mandrake
so that lilo can see all of the kernels.  In theory I could have the
other two be equally omniscient, but in practice that's a hassle so
I just make sure their lilo.conf files include an entry for the master
distro so I can go back and fix lilo later, and I try not to run lilo
from the other distros any more than I have to.

Obviously I'm not too happy with the arrangement.  What's a better way?
Is there a way to make lots of different distros share one /boot?
If I ever want to switch to grub for one distro, can I do that without
losing access to all the lilo-using distros?  Would using grub for all
the distros make this easier, or harder?

	...Akkana