Re: [Hampshire] Recommended dual-boot Ubuntu set-up

On Friday 29 October 2010 11:03:39 Chris Smith wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Can I ask what is the recommended disk set-up for dual-/multi-booting
> Ubuntu distros?
>
> I usually partition my disk with an ext2 /boot partition and the
> remaining disk given over to LVM, with separate logical volumes for /
> and /home.

I know how you feel. Actually The modern Grub 2 can handle multiple distros
very well.

In Ubuntu run sudo update-grub.

This creates a new grub.cfg in /boot/grub

Copy the distro details into 40_custom located in /etc/grub.d
You can modify the names of the distro to what ever you like.

Make the other files non-executable and the 40_custom executable.

run sudo update-grub again and you end up with the grub listing you want at
boot up.


> This works well for a single distro, but causes problems
> with multiple distros: an Ubuntu kernel package update in one distro
> mangles the GRUB entries for all others -- in particular it is a
> complete disaster for 32- and 64-bit as the kernels have the same name,
> so not only are the grub entries mangled, but the kernel images also
> overwritten.
>
> So, since the way I do things is clearly not working, is there a better
> way?
>
> Cheers,
> Chris