Can I dual boot between Ubuntn and Austrumi linux? How?

Yes you can have both using the same /home folder. You'll just need to resize Ubuntu down to about 20Gb or at least enough to give Astrumi some space. When you install Astrumi into the space you've made for it then their grub-loader (or lilo) should be installed into the mbr as normal and should automatically create entries for Ubuntu and any other OS on your system. You can always boot into Ubuntu and reinstall the grub so that you can use the Ubuntu one instead if you want later.

Is Ubuntu on the 40Gb drive at the moment? Does it have the /home folder on a separate partition on the 100Gb drive?

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Austrumi Linux installs only with LILO.

I tried this last night, I resized the 40 gig drive which contains Ubuntu, down to about 20 gig, I kept 1.5 gig in reserve for Swap, and proportioned the remaining for installing Austrumi.

So my drive map looks like:

/dev/sda1 is mount point "/"
/dev/sda3 is mount point "/austrumi" (Austrumi apparently requires a reiserfs format)
/dev/sdb1 is mount point "/home" (this is the separate 100 gig drive)

Unfortunately when I installed Austrumi, it overwrote something on the hard drive so I could no longer get to GRUB.

I booted from the Ubuntu live CD and tried to reinstall GRUB, following whatever I could research and find but to no avail, I couldn't revive GRUB. I ended up having to reinstall Ubuntu all over again.

Now I have Ubuntu back. But I cannot access Austrumi in it's partition at all. :(

If Austrumi cannot work with GRUB, is there any way I can make Ubuntu work with LILO? How can I make these two dance together without isolating one another? Both have very nice features and certainly there is no lack of resource on my system.

My problem boils now down to a conflict between one system requiring LILO to install and the other requiring GRUB. How do I resolve this please?

Thanks.

Ubuntu should be able to boot from Lilo. I would guess that it just needs a new menu entry to be written in.

Alternatively the grub menu might be easier to modify to include Astrumi. Lets try grub first because i've more idea of what to do with it. Open a command-line perhaps by going up to the top taskbar and click on

Applications - Accessories - Terminal

(there are other ways of course). into the teminal/command window/console type

cd /boot/grub
ls
sudo cp menu.lst menu.030509
ls
sudo gedit menu.lst

note the first sudo command will want your normal user password and wont give any stars to give-away the passwords length. "ls" is a lower-case "LS" and shows a LiSt of what's in the folder. The 2nd "ls" shows that the CoPy command has created a copy of the current menu.lst - handy if all goes wrong ;) Now scroll down the text-editor Gedit until you pass all the lines starting with # (we say these are "commented out", which means the machine doesn't read them, they are just there for our human eyes ;) ). Look for a chunk of stuff that looks like

## ## End Default Options ##

title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.28-1-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-1-generic root=UUID=66daaabd-ec15-5184-9ee5-df800b17fde2 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-1-generic
quiet

Add in this little chunk, just to see if it works, we might need to change it later tho! but that should be easy :) Ok, so make that section look like this

## ## End Default Options ##

title Astrumi
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-23-generic root=/dev/sda3
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-23-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.28-1-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-1-generic root=UUID=66daaabd-ec15-5184-9ee5-df800b17fde2 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-1-generic
quiet

You will need to navigate possibly through the "Places" menu to the astrumi "/boot" folder so you can look up what vmlinuz & initrd.img numbers you need to use instead of 2.6.24-23. You might need to use "View" and tick the "Show hidden files" box.

Reiserfs is an excellent file-system, i'm more familiar with ext3 but i think ReiserFs is also journalised which is great, unless you've got solid state drives. It tends to keep data safer and suffers a lot less from random problems such as bumps, jolts and cosmic rays a lot less :) You could, of course, install Ubuntu on Reiserfs but it's easier to stick with the more familiar ext3 i think ;)

Anyway, hopefully this should now offer you an option to boot into Austrumi and hopefully it should work, although we might need to have another look at some of those again ;)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Lilo is quite old now but it's hugely more sophisticated than the boot-loader in Vista and we should be able to work with it quite easily but i am more familiar with the much newer Grub. Grub is usually quite a bit better than Lilo but there's not really much difference, they are both miles ahead of Windows boot-loaders tho :)

Hmmm.....I found that only by giving each OS it's own separate hard drive could I get them to behave, but even now though Austrumi is listed in GRUB, I cannot boot from it, giving an error 15.

Is there no way to install Ubuntu without installing GRUB but instead installing LILO? I've seen nothing in the install process which would suggest otherwise, have I overlooked something?

It should be quite possible to install Lilo over the top of grub. Ubuntu should start up easily from Lilo but i've not used lilo much so can't really help you there. I know Puppy tends to prefer Lilo so maybe their forums might be worth trying out. Also the Astrumi forums, obvioulsy. As i said there's not really a huge difference between lilo and grub, they are both on a hugely higher level than Windows boot-loaders. Grub is a bit newer but Lilo is still superb.

You might need to initially install Ubuntu with grub but then just install Lilo and the last boot-loader you installed should take over :)

The nnumbers i gave for the grub menu entry are quite likely to be all wrong. It could be worth trying to check them. I think the problem is very likely to be the addresses i gave for where initrd and vmlinuz are. It might be that they need to be changed from

/boot/...

to

astrumi/boot/...

Hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

/astrumi/boot/...

It's late just now, I just got home after helping my FIL with his computer stuff, so I'll have no time to try things out just now.

Still I've been researching this elsewhere and there's something called Chainload? What is that? Would it be of any use to me?

Well i really think the problem is simply that grub is being sent to the wrong addresses for the files it needs so i think the answer is in my previous posts.

The chainloader is a line that is normally used for Windows but i've never seen it being used for a linux. Here's the block for booting into Windows on my drive

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hdb1
title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd1,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

I really don't think it's relevant to a linux though. I've tried quite a few other disros of linux and never used it for them
Anyway, good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Here's my Grub menu.lst:

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic
uuid c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic (recovery mode)
uuid c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
uuid c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode)
uuid c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic

title Ubuntu 8.10, memtest86+
uuid c4626f97-9cb2-4218-911d-9089cfb49aae
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sdb1.
title AUSTRUMI (on /dev/sdb1)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro vga = normal append ="rw 4 init=/boot/linuxrc
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sdb1.
title AUSTRUMI-TEXT (on /dev/sdb1)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 ro append ="rw 3 init=/boot/linuxrc
savedefault
boot

I found that first I should partition my drives. Then I should install Austrumi on one drive.

Then I should install Ubuntu on the second drive.

This works to let GRUB recognize them and not cause them to delete each other, fight over who takes over the computer.

Of course now Austrumi ceases to boot during the second stage, it seems to stall after it gets it's ip address.

I can still boot into Austrumi from the CD and I even installed it on my USB memory stick to boot from successfully. But just not from the hard drive!

Go figure!

Hmmm, it looks like your menu.lst is perfect. I'm not sure it needs "savedefault" and "boot" after the astrumi options but they seem familiar and i guess you know what you're doing with the boot options such as "ro vga = normal append ="rw 4 init=/boot/linuxrc", these aren't just copied from Lilo are they? I'm not sure if Lilo would use different boot-options, i would have imagined it used the same ones as i think they are talking to the kernel rather than the boot-loader. I think the addresses look right too. I can't imagine that there would be much diffeerence in having the 2 OS's on different physical drives but it'd be interesting to see if that does make a difference.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

I really don't know what I'm doing....he he......but I'm just trying to find the right combination where the two can play together in the same computer and not step on one another.

I never got both Austrumi and Ubuntu to exist on the same hard drive, that's just impossible because when they install they "fight" to be dominant on who's going to boot.

If I install Austrumi first and Ubuntu second, then GRUB overwrites LILO and I never see Austrumi again.

If I install Ubuntu first and Austrumi second, LILO overwrites GRUB and I never see Ubuntu again.

So foolish, isn't it! They each insist on their own sandbox! So that's how I resolved the boot issue, but there are still many problems.

And now my 9.04 upgrade refuses to connect to the internet, it refuses to see anything out of the Ethernet port at all. It's supremely annoying and time-wasting!

Perhaps try asking about the dual-boot on the Astrumi forums

http://austrumi.mypunbb.com/

http://forums.slackers.lv/viewforum.php?f=12

I hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi :)

Just wondered if you have solved this problem yet or are you still having troubles? If you still need help then try re-posting the question in here when you are ready to try working through any suggestions
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+addquestion

or else post the question on a more general linux forum such as
http://www.linuxquestions.org

I hope all is going well
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

No, sorry, I've given up trying to solve it. Both systems want to be first and neither want to share.

Aww heck. I noticed in DistroWatch the main man, Ladislav, seemed to have some good answers about editing Lilo
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090525&mode=67
around post number 223 and earlier. It might be worth getting his contact details from the bottom of that page and asking him directly or try the general linux forums at
http://www.linuxquestions.org

Anyway, whatever you try, good luck with it
Regards from
Tom :)