LindowsOS and Fedora2 on same machine
By glazou on Friday 12 March 2004, 15:57 - Computing - Permalink
I have a desktop machine with a 160 gigs HD. Enough to carry WinXP, LindowsOS 4.5 and Fedora 2 with multiple Mozilla source trees everywhere...
Installing Fedora 2 : Fedora refuses to install in an empty HD space if that HD space is not located after all partitions. So I used Partition Magic to resize the winXP single partition of my HD to 1/3 of what it was. Then I made a FAT primary partition with one half of the remaining free space. I told Fedora 2 to install itself in the HD remaining free space and it worked just fine. At that time, I had a dual-boot WinXP/Fedora2 box with GRUB.
Now let's install LindowsOS. Easy, just tell it to use the FAT partition we created above instead of the whole disk. Super-simple. After that, you have a machine with three OSes on it...
But LILO does not list Fedora 2!!! Sigh... So what should you do to have access to both Linuxes ?
After the install process described above, boot LindowsOS, login as
root. Type mount and locate the two auto-mounted
partitions corresponding to Fedora's root and Fedora's boot directory.
On my config, these were respectively /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda5.
Then copy the files /disks/hda5/vmlinuz-2.6.1-1.65smp
and /disks/hda5/initrd-2.6.1-1.65smp.img into the /boot
directory of your LindowsOS.
Now edit /etc/lilo.conf and add the following lines,
just changing the root line to match your own configuration
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.1-1.65smp
label=Fedora2
root=/dev/hda6
vga=normal
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.1-1.65smp.img
Run /sbin/lilo and then disable jiffyboot with a chmod
644 /sbin/jiffyboot
That's it. Just reboot and enjoy the fact that LILO now lists Fedora2 and is able to run it.
Comments
I've always used xosl for multiboot installs. It manages bootmanagers. Each lilo copy only manages its own install that way. It boots into a windows-like environment with gui-based configuration. Easy, powerful, pretty, reliable, in my experience anyway (using it on three different machines). Too bad it's no longer actively developed anymore. Maybe some kind soul will pick up the source one of these days and keep developing it.
www.ranish.com/part/xosl....
vmware is also a good alternative when it comes to testing an application that doesn't rely on specific hardware. Have you looked at it?
From a build perspective, it would not be the most performant, but at least you don't have to reboot.
Really practical to test different environment.
Have to be said that with the current computer prises, two (or more) computers and one KVM box can be a good solution as well. It will also be easier to test the FTP code, and make the multiplatform build process a lot faster.
Use a real bootloader. Use grub.
And don't use FAT for a linux install