[Techtalk] Booting multiple distros on one machine

[Zohar, Itai]

Grub sounds like a workable solution to your case, because you can
dynamically change your boot parameters during boot.
In Lilo, the root partition and kernel file name are static and have to be
commited a priori. Grub is interactive, you can change these parameters and
commit them from the grub prompt. And if something fails, or you've made a
mistake in the grub configuration file, you won't be stuck at the next boot
with no options.

Itai. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Malcolm Tredinnick [mailto:malcolm at commsecure.com.au]
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2002 5:57 AM
To: techtalk at linuxchix.org
Subject: Re: [Techtalk] Booting multiple distros on one machine


On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 10:35:53AM -0700, Akkana wrote:
> 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).

This all sounds pretty sensible, but you need to make sure each distro
uses the same version of lilo and then you can have a single boot
partition. After all, LILO uses the lilo.conf file only to write the
special magic stuff to the MBR or whatever partition it boots from.
After that, it can boot with any partition as root and with any image
you like. So, if you want to go this route, just make sure the lilo
binary for each distro is roughly the same, or just use one of the
distros when you rerun lilo. That way, each distro can have its own /
partition, but share a common /boot.

For slightly slower performance, but useful for testing when you don't
have the spare partitions: use Usermode Linux with a different distro as
the root filesystem for the uml process. This isn't quite the same as
completely booting up into Debian or Mandrake or whatever, but I have
found it useful from time to time to test if something works on another
"out of the box" distro.

Malcolm

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