Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Can I share my /boot and swap partitions with other Linux installs?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 02 April 2007, Alexander Skwar wrote:
> Daevid Vincent <daevid@××××××.com> wrote:
> > Can I install Ubuntu in yet another partition and have it share the
> > /boot and swap ones I already have, or do I need dedicated ones for
> > that distro too?
>
> No, you don't NEED to have seperate /boot partitions. The problem
> might be, that the default filenames "overlap" in Gentoo and Ubuntu.
> But if you make sure that this does not happen and if you setup
> your bootloader (grub?) "properly", then all is fine.

I routinely set up machines for colleagues as triple-boot (Red Hat, 
Ubuntu, XP), and it's the easiest thing in the world. /boot is really 
just a convenient place to put kernel images and grub.conf where grub 
can find them at boot time.

There is a very slim outside chance that two distros might use the same 
name for a kernel, and one clobbers the other. If you want to avoid 
this, create /boot/ubuntu and /boot/redhat (adjust as appropriate), and 
let the distros install kernels into /boot. Then manually move them to 
the correct subdirectory and adjust the "kernel" and "initrd" entries 
in grub.conf to reflect the new path. 

Or you could just rename the kernel, config, initrd and System.map files 
by appending the distro name. There are many possible schemes, so use 
whatever floats your boat.

To save yourself much pain and grief, use one distro to install and 
maintain grub/lilo, and install the other distro *without* a boot 
loader. No distro requires a boot loader to work, as long as you have 
one that can find and load a kernel image, it all works out

alan


-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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