multibooting linux

Joel Rees joel.rees at gmail.com
Thu Jun 24 01:21:19 UTC 2010


On Jun 23, 2010, at 8:31 PM, Steven I Usdansky wrote:

> My vote is for one grub to rule them all,

I see that my phrasing was misunderstood. No matter. The issues have  
been made clear.

(Was thinking of one grub to rule all the distros/OSses, not one grub  
to rule all the other grubs. Must be because I'm not a Star Wars fan.  
And I see that, in my effort to avoid talking too much, I ended up  
trimming out the parts recommending chaining grub. Maybe I figured  
the OP would understand that part, coming from the BSDs.)

> each distro's grub goes into
> / rather than the mbr, and the master grub just chainloads each  
> distro's
> grub. I had been setting up the master grub to point to /vmlinuz and
> /initrd in each distro, but that involves updating the appropriate  
> symlinks
> each time a new kernel is installed.

Pain in the neck, hey?

> Having come across a few distros
> that insist on installing a bootloader whether I want it or not,
> chainloading appears to be the only sane way to deal with them,  
> even if
> it adds a few seconds to the boot sequence.


I'll add that the few seconds can be tuned. Wait time of zero only  
adds about two seconds per grub in the chain, and there isn't any  
need to extend the chain beyond the second grub in most configurations.

I don't set the wait time to zero, myself. Sometimes I like to boot  
single user. Three seconds usually gives me enough time to react, if  
I watch it like a hawk.

By far, the bulk of the boot time is in {mutter-mutter.} BIOS, anyway.

I'm chattering too much, again.

Joel Rees


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