A Multiboot Linux / Winders System

Somehow I managed to trash the hard drive in my newly converted Debian box. It’s been running great a long time but the DVD drive was having problems so I replaced it. While I had the box apart I decided to clean the dust out and straighten a few things up.

Like so many things in life, fans are unpredictable. Predictably, one of them began making noise after cleaning the dust out of it. An innocent ‘thump’ on the box to settle the fan and SCREECH!!! the hard drive sounded like my ’99 Pontiac when it needs the brake pads replaced. I was horrified.

Another instintive ‘thump’ and the noise was gone (after all, the thump made the noise come, why SHOULDN”T it make it go??) but so was all my data. Surface tests revealed error after error, the drive was dead. Off to the magnet retrieval pile.

I love my cube. I hate to see it doing nothing. It’s a great little computer and while it’s starting to get dated it still serves my purpose nicely. Besides, I don’t have the money for a new box and this one works fine when it has a hard drive with good brake pads. So like any good tech I raped the drive out of a dormant machine and rebuilt mine, new fans notwithstanding. (more on that later)

With a new (to me) 320 GiB drive I just couldn’t resist a multiboot machine. I’m not one to download all sorts of media and the kinds of things I do with my computer don’t take huge storage so 50GiB is more than enough for me with any OS. I decided that 5 or 6 OS’s could easily fit on the drive with another partition to share between the distros for code, etc.

I ended up with XP, Mandriva, Debian, Fedora and Kubuntu with the additional partition left for a shared folder like /code or something. One of the things I found most important (for me) was the order in which I installed the distros – they each have their own quirky way of installing Grub and some are not so friendly as to look for other linux distros. All find Winders, but only Kubuntu was friendly enough to find them all so I installed that one last after a few go’s of trying to edit Grub myself. I’ll leave that one for when I’m ready to get a little more hard core.

So, for a newbie that wants to try several of the Linux distros and still keep your Winders installed, the easiest way for me was to wipe the HD clean with something like GWScan or DiskWipe (I used the UBCD downloadable at www.ultimatebootcd.com )

I usually install Winders first since I still use XP. (I understand Vister is smarter and may look for other OS’s for it’s bootloader, but I haven’t tried it and probably never will. Grub / Lilo is fine for me.) When installing WInders, at the point where it asks to select the partition to install to, select ‘C’ to create a new partition and create it with just the amount of space you want it to have, not the NTire disk. Having a 320 GiB drive (which really is 300, go figure) I chose to give each OS 50 GiB and leave the rest for a common files storage drive.

As with Winders, with each OS installed it gives you a choice to let the installer automatically create the partitions for you or allow you to do it manually. The automatic way really does result in a more efficient layout of partitions, but make it really complicated when you have numerous distros installed. I choose to do it manually, and have ONE partition (‘/’) for each and a shared Swap partition since only one distro will be running at a time.

On the first Linux distro installed, manually set the partitions and make the first one the swap partition. For me it makes more sense that way because it physically separates the Winders partitions from the Linux ones. Just my pref … Make your swap partition about twice the total ram you have (this article is representative of what I’ve found on the web but I digress …) and set the amount of space you want it to have and go from there.

I usually choose to do the minimal ‘desktop’ installation for any distro if given a chance. For the Debian distro I started from Netinst that just gave me a command line prompt and that was COOL to use apt-get to install the system. There are some limitations but only to what you know about linux. Which, for me, is very little …

Done this way I can also at any time reinstall any of the distros without disturbing the others. I just have to remember to tell the install NOT to set up the bootloader and everything will work just fine. One thing about Grub – it’s incredibly customizable and every distro sets it up their own way. So far only Kubuntu was friendly enough to see ALL the other distros so now I install that last and I have a great startup menu for my Cube.

Now it’s on to see which distro is the friendliest for setting up a build environment for my Atmel ATNGW100 board. The Buildroot utility worked fine on Mandriva but so far I’ve not been able to get any of the other environments running like AVRStudio or any of the QT dev packages. I want QT because it’s supposed to be superior in writing code for embedded devices. See their Brag.

I’ll write more as I play!

Tracy N4LGH

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