multibooting

[Rick Stevens]

Dick Bentley wrote:
> Running three OSs plus Knoppix on an AMD64-based machine with 3 large SATA
> drives, onr allocated to each system -- currently XP Prox64, Debian, and
> Ubuntu -- I started out with XP, Fedora, and Ubuntu.  When I upgraded Ubuntu
> it correctly modified the GRUB bootloader, but when I upgraded Fedora to 9
> it failed to recognize and incorporate the other operating systems.  My goal
> with this circus is to identify a Linux or Unix based system I will be happy
> with as a replacement for Microsoft when they quit supporting XP, which is
> as far as I'm willing to go with them on my home/office workstation (a very
> small and neglected market).

That's interesting.  F9 should have at least recognized XP.  Was this a
fresh install or an upgrade?  Did you tell F9 to ignore the other drives
when you installed (if so, that's probably why it didn't build grub
entries for them).

> Anyone know if Fedora 10 will play nice with XP and Ubuntu via GRUB?

Hmmm.  F10 has some issues that you may want to let settle before you
use it.  For example, the machine I have it on is a Phenom X4 with an
nVidia 8200 video card that the base nv driver simply doesn't grok ("no
device found").  I had to go get nVidia's binary blob driver for it to
work properly.  Another example: the network config for fixed IPs has a
nasty tendency to set the netmask for the NIC to the IP address you gave
it _instead_ of the _netmask_ you specified.  Easy to fix once you sort
out what's wrong (ifconfig is your friend).

> I gave up on SUSE, which seems determined to have the whole machine or
> nothing; but I would like to get a little more experience with Fedora.  I
> still have freeBSD and Solaris on my list as well.  I always ran Red Hat
> with my Windows system at home until they split off Fedora and went for the
> corporate market, and I have worked in Windows, MacIntosh, and Solaris shops
> -- so now that I am in my Golden Years I do know what I am groping toward.

Well, keep in mind that Fedora is the bleeding edge of Red Hat.  Each
release has roughly a 6 month life span and older releases are EOLed two
months after the second successor has been released (F10 came out last
week, F8 will be EOLed at the end of the year, perhaps January).

For stability, think CentOS...built from RHEL source RPMs with RH
badging replaced.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                      ricks at nerd.com -
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-  Perseverance:  When you're too damned stubborn to say "I quit!"   -
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