CentOS - Jan 2008 - VDQ : Triple Boot Advice?

Let me set up a Very Dumb Question (VDQ). My apologies in advance for
repeating much of this to those who have been of such vast help getting me
this far. (Followup to: is set as gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general)

I have a testbed machine which currently has /dev/hda1 - 6, according to
qtparted, with sizes 102 MB, 14 GB, 13 GB, 13 GB, 12 GB, and 14 MB
respectively (rounded to nearest whole MB or GB). It actually boots only
Ubuntu, which is on hda5. hda1 is /boot, and hda6 is swap.

I had CentOS alone on the whole hard drive, and found that Ubuntu 6.06
couldn't keep it, by any means I could find, using the GUI installer.
(Dunno if that's anaconda or something else.)

Getting Ubuntu 6.06-alternate instead, I tried to stumble and stagger
through text-install and manual partitioning, both for the first time --
and, not surprisingly, eventually did get Ubuntu installed, only at
the price of hosing CentOS.

(If I were doing it all over, perhaps I should do the partitioning first
and separately, with knoppix or gparted, or with qtparted if that has a
live cd. Maybe I should Dban the whole shebang, and repartition first
anyway ...)

After much help, I concluded that that release of Ubuntu had also been a
mistake : getting my must-have apps onto it cost lots of grief, and the
most essential, Alpine 1.0, never made it at all. That means I can't yet
give Ubuntu a fair test as to filling my needs.

So now I want to install CentOS 5.1 again, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora 8.

The VDQ comes in three parts.

First, the sequence : I'd prefer to put the new Ubuntu  onto one of the 13
GB partitions, and make it end up second in boot sequence. 

I *think* I'll be safer to install it first in time, and with the GUI
.iso, *not* with the text-install, which I lack the savvy to use. 

Can I do that? Or does installing it first in time force me to use the
first free partition? (If it does, but lets me keep the rest of the setup,
I'd rather live with it than tackle the text-install again, let alone
re-partition.)

Second, also about the sequence : given that all I've ever really run has
been RedHat or Fedora (but I've been doing that since RH7), will I be any
better off installing one of them before the other?

Third, does anyone know of an example somewhere of a grub.conf, for a
machine running three linuces, which I can manage to clone once I do get
all three installed?

I'm assuming that each OS will have a way of booting itself once I get to
it, and that the first and hardest job will be instructing grub how to get
to each, in a way that enables it to update for itself whenever any of
the three gets a fresh kernel on some update. Is that right?

My experience in the past has been that grub is everywhere dense, as the
mathematicians say. Not in this life will I get my head far enough
around it to have a real grasp of how to configure it -- not and get it
right. Man grub and its ilk wear out my fingernails as I try to climb the
walls.

But I can copy and vary, or follow a recipe if it's explicit enough.

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck, Double Retiree,
Not Quite Clueless Linux Power User : F8, C5.1, U6.06;
I have precious (very precious) little idea where up is.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org 
> [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Beartooth Testbedder
> Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 10:10 AM
> To: centos at centos.org
> Cc: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com; fedora-list at redhat.com
> Subject: [CentOS] VDQ : Triple Boot Advice?
> 
> 
> Let me set up a Very Dumb Question (VDQ). My apologies in 
> advance for repeating much of this to those who have been of 
> such vast help getting me this far. (Followup to: is set as 
> gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general)
> 
> I have a testbed machine which currently has /dev/hda1 - 6, 
> according to qtparted, with sizes 102 MB, 14 GB, 13 GB, 13 
> GB, 12 GB, and 14 MB respectively (rounded to nearest whole 
> MB or GB). It actually boots only Ubuntu, which is on hda5. 
> hda1 is /boot, and hda6 is swap.
> 
> I had CentOS alone on the whole hard drive, and found that 
> Ubuntu 6.06 couldn't keep it, by any means I could find, 
> using the GUI installer.
> (Dunno if that's anaconda or something else.)
> 
> Getting Ubuntu 6.06-alternate instead, I tried to stumble and 
> stagger through text-install and manual partitioning, both 
> for the first time -- and, not surprisingly, eventually did 
> get Ubuntu installed, only at the price of hosing CentOS.
> 
> (If I were doing it all over, perhaps I should do the 
> partitioning first and separately, with knoppix or gparted, 
> or with qtparted if that has a live cd. Maybe I should Dban 
> the whole shebang, and repartition first anyway ...)
> 
> After much help, I concluded that that release of Ubuntu had 
> also been a mistake : getting my must-have apps onto it cost 
> lots of grief, and the most essential, Alpine 1.0, never made 
> it at all. That means I can't yet give Ubuntu a fair test as 
> to filling my needs.
> 
> So now I want to install CentOS 5.1 again, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora 8.
> 
> The VDQ comes in three parts.
> 
> First, the sequence : I'd prefer to put the new Ubuntu  onto 
> one of the 13 GB partitions, and make it end up second in 
> boot sequence. 
> 
> I *think* I'll be safer to install it first in time, and with 
> the GUI .iso, *not* with the text-install, which I lack the 
> savvy to use. 
> 
> Can I do that? Or does installing it first in time force me 
> to use the first free partition? (If it does, but lets me 
> keep the rest of the setup, I'd rather live with it than 
> tackle the text-install again, let alone
> re-partition.)
> 
> Second, also about the sequence : given that all I've ever 
> really run has been RedHat or Fedora (but I've been doing 
> that since RH7), will I be any better off installing one of 
> them before the other?
> 
> Third, does anyone know of an example somewhere of a 
> grub.conf, for a machine running three linuces, which I can 
> manage to clone once I do get all three installed?
> 
> I'm assuming that each OS will have a way of booting itself 
> once I get to it, and that the first and hardest job will be 
> instructing grub how to get to each, in a way that enables it 
> to update for itself whenever any of the three gets a fresh 
> kernel on some update. Is that right?
> 
> My experience in the past has been that grub is everywhere 
> dense, as the mathematicians say. Not in this life will I get 
> my head far enough around it to have a real grasp of how to 
> configure it -- not and get it right. Man grub and its ilk 
> wear out my fingernails as I try to climb the walls.
> 
> But I can copy and vary, or follow a recipe if it's explicit enough.
> 
> --
> Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck, Double Retiree, Not Quite 
> Clueless Linux Power User : F8, C5.1, U6.06; I have precious 
> (very precious) little idea where up is.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos


Every time I dual boot a single hard drive, I always regret it. Either one
of the install is messed up, and reinstalling one runs the risk of harming
the others. I have managed to collect a few 20-40G drives over the years, so
I always do stand-alone installs, (remove all other drives during the
install), and then use the bios to pick which hard drive I want to start
from.
Another option is, lately, I've been using VirtualBox to run XP inside
Linux, and Linux inside XP. That way I don't have to reboot, and can use
"both" OS's at once. I'm using fairly old hardware, and am
happy with the
performance for lots of uses. (No games, though)
Either way is a lot less irritation, and, should the second or third install
mess something up, I don't run the risk of breaking the other
installations....

Also, I usually do my installs on a 10g "base drive", get it all where
I
want it, and then use the gparted/clonezilla boot CD to take an image of it,
(I dump it up to my samba server, but you can do it to another drive - even
USB), switch out to the drive I want it on, dump the image back down and use
gparted to fill up the drive. (if you build it on an 80g, you can't easily
dump the image down on a 40...) One advantage is that I have a base Centos5
build that I ran all the updates on, and took an image. If I need to start
over, I just restore the image, and I'm back at the base image. Don't
have
to go through the whole install again (just a yum update). I did this when I
was trying out Amanda/Bacula for backups (I used bacula), KnowledgeTree and
Maarch for Document Archiving (no decision yet), I just dumped my image down
on the machine and started over.
I'm going to do it for Zimbra here in a few days, cause I keep hearing all
the talk, and want to see what I can use it for.

I know I didn't answer your question, 'cause I really don't try to
do it
that way. But I thought you might I'd share with you what I do, as I thought
it might be pertinent.

Dennis

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:09:40 -0500, I Beartooth wrote:
> ... I want to install CentOS 5.1 again, Ubuntu 7.10, and Fedora 8.
> (If I were doing it all over, perhaps I should do the partitioning first
> and separately, with knoppix or gparted, or with qtparted if that has a
> live cd. Maybe I should Dban the whole shebang, and repartition first
> anyway ...) 
	Well, I did it; I wish I knew more exactly *how* I did it. I'll 
outline it, and maybe one of the gurux here can generalize and polish it 
into a real recipe.

	I did DBAN the whole hard drive before anything else.
 
> I *think* I'll be safer to install Ubuntu first, and with the GUI
> .iso, *not* with the text-install, which I lack the savvy to use.
	Previous failures taught me the reverse. I installed CentOS 
first, with manual partitioning, creating a /boot partition, a main one 
for C5, and a swap partition -- leaving the rest of the space free, iirc. 
When I got it through firstboot, I did a little minimal configuring, to 
have a usable desktop and a couple of things I expected to use, such as 
gparted a/o qtparted.

	Then I installed F8, again with manual partitioning.

	When I got it through firstboot and another minimal 
configuration, I rebooted another time. Sure enough, booting to C5 now 
failed.

	So I set up a gnome terminal with two tabs each su'd to root, and 
another workspace with gparted running -- not doing anything, just 
looking.

	I opened F8's /etc/grub.conf with a text editor on one root tab; 
on the other, I did "mkdir /TEST" followed by "mount -t ext3
/dev/sdax /
TEST" 

	Then cd /TEST, followed by ls and cd some more, till I got to a 
grub.conf or a menu.lst

	(NB:you have to use sd in F8, where you'd use hd in C5 or U7; 
start with x = 1, and keep looking till you can see from the file names 
that you're in the one for C5; there is no space between the third / and 
TEST.)
	At that point, with c&p between the tabs, I cloned an entry for 
C5 into the configuration for F8.

	Then I cd'd out of the mounted partition, unmounted it, and 
rebooted to make sure. Now C5 and F8 did both boot successfully.

	So I installed U7, again with manual partitioning; it insisted, 
as the others had not, on making an extra partition -- God knows why. I 
bit my fingernails, and kept going.

	After the install, to no surprise on my part, I could boot to 
both F8 and U7, but C5 had disappeared.

	Now comes a (probably evitable) heresy. 

	I booted to U7's rescue, or minimal, or whatever; got to the root 
prompt at the end of it; commanded "passwd" and gave it a root
password;
and rebooted into regular U7.

	Now I could again set two terminal tabs to root. 

	Those of you actually comfortable with sudoing, and not worried 
about timing out while you study things at length, may want to skip the 
heretical root password.

	Again I launched gparted (which I had had to get from synaptic) 
to look with -- and this time mounted both U7's own partition and one of 
the others. (I had to do it that way, because I didn't find a way to 
simply cd from root to what turned out to be /boot/grub/menu.lst; but 
with U7's partition once mounted under /root, I could edit it.)

	Now I got to the bottom of menu.lst, below the F8 entry which I 
knew worked; and copied/cloned an entry for C5 onto the bottom of it.

	When I got back out of everything, lo and behold!, all three OSs 
did boot successfully.
> ... does anyone know of an example somewhere of a grub.conf, for a
> machine running three linuces, which I can manage to clone once I do get
> all three installed?
	I never found one. I'm not completely sure where the one that 
works is, but I believe (once I finish customizing) I'll be able to get 
to it and post it or email it, if anyone asks.

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Fedora 8; CentOS 5.1; Ubuntu 7.10; Alpine 1.0, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.3;
Dillo 0.8.6, Galeon 2.0.3, Epiphany 2.20, Opera 9.25, Firefox 2.0
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.