grub help

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I've been using Linux for quite a while, even back before grub, back in the days when lilo was the popular bootloader. But I've finally got to ask... why is grub so brain dead when it booting multiple Linux distros? Is there a workaround? I'm currently running three different Linux distros, two kernels per distro, and have to edit the /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst on the most recently installed distro every time I do a kernel upgrade on any but the most recently installed distro. I've been doing this ever since I began running multiple Linux distros on the same computer... back when I was dual booting RedHat Linux 8 and RHL9. That was about 7 or so years ago. Before that it was just "one computer, one Linux distro" and a reinstall when the next version was available.

Today I did kernel upgrades on F8, FC6 and StartCom Linux AS5 (a RH AS5 clone) on this computer and it's beginning to get old.

There must be a better way, but searching this forum and googling it, all I found was solutions for people needing to dual boot Windows and Linux. It's been so long since I've booted a Windows install that I'm not quite sure I'd know what to do if it did manage to boot and really couldn't care much less about ever booting Windows :-)

I want to give SUSE 10.3 (yeah, I know, M$ and Novell and all that, but I have to use SLED 10 at work and would like to play with the newest SUSE at home a bit) but am getting really put off with this constant editing of grub.

So is there an easier way , or should I just quit whining and be glad that my biggest complaint is having to mount other partitions and crank up vi to edit a grub file when I do a kernel upgrade?

Anyway, thanks for listening... I just cracked another beer and feel better already :-)

Jim Dishaw

[stoat]

Hello dishawjp,

Probably the most recently installed distro is the one whose GRUB is booting the others which is why you have to edit it when one of the others has a kernel update. Right? Instead of copying the kernel and initrd lines from the other distros' grub.conf files into the grub.conf of the one that boots them, try this single line...

title whatever
configfile (hdx,y)/grub/grub.conf

or

title whatever
configfile (hdx,y)/boot/grub/grub.conf

or

title whatever
configfile (hdx,y)/grub/menu.lst

or

title whatever
configfile (hdx,y)/boot/grub/menu.lst

One of those will probably work for each of your other distros. If it works, no edit is required when a kernel gets updated. Don't do it for the main distro's own section, obviously.

P.S.: Use /boot in the path when the distro does not have a separate boot partition. And actually, menu.lst will probably work for any distro including Fedora.

[dishawjp]

Stoat,

Thanks! That's just what I've been looking for!

And to think that for all these years I've been messing around with manual edits. I'm not feeling too smart at the moment, but the next couple of beers ought to fix that :-)

Thanks again!

Jim