Dual Boot for the same OS - with different functions

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Fri May 13 13:14:42 UTC 2005


Rajiv wrote:
> Dear All,
> I have fedora core 3 installed in my machine. I would like to
> have two boot options in GRUB- for the same linux - fedora core 3. Both
> the options accesses exactly the same partitions. The difference
> between the two boot options is
> 
> 1. services each boot option starts up
> 2. Environment variable exported in /etc/profile. For one boot option
>    the environment variable exported should be different and for other
>    the environment varible is default linux.
> 3. Also there are two commands which I have added to /usr/sbin
>    in one options which does different option in one boot option while
>    for the other it is default linux.
> 4. For one boot option default boot level - /etc/inittab is GRAPHICAL
>   while for the other it is TEXT.
> 
> Is this possible in Linux. This may not be the right list to ask
> this question. I don't want to install the same OS twice with seperate / 
> partions
> for this. Pls give some initial guidance on this.

You could do this by adding extra parameters on the grub command line, 
which you could then check in your initscripts by looking at 
/proc/cmdline and having those scripts behave differently based on the 
contents of that file. Your changes to the initscripts will probably get 
overwritten next time there's an update to the initscripts package though.

Paul.




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