multibooting linux

[Jerry Feldman]

  On 06/23/2010 09:21 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2010, at 8:31 PM, Steven I Usdansky wrote:
>
>> My vote is for one grub to rule them all,
>
Just want to chime in a bit. I used to multi-boot Linux years ago when I 
was running SuSE. When a new release came out I would multi-boot the old 
and new versions. I knew about the grub issues and handled them 
satisfactorily, but the issue of sharing one's home directory bit be in 
the posterior. At that time I was running KDE. At this point, the 
interaction between the old release and new release that contained an 
updated KDE essentially made my desktop unusable to where I essentially 
had to switch to GNOME (or another window manager but retaining the same 
display manager) at the time. Because I run many Linux installfests, I 
had always advocated allocating a separate /home partition.

One possible solution is to set up your real home directory with 
symlinks to different desktop configurations, such as:
/home/mydir
/home/fakeFedora12
/home/fakeFedora13
Then set up a login script to symlink the relevant configuration files 
and directories. While this is a real PIA, it allows you to have a 
single home directory, but when initially configuring your new release, 
create the fake directories, and copy your relevant configs, such as 
~/.gnome2 in these fake directories. As I said it is a real PIA, but it 
is workable, and allows you to boot into whatever system you want.

Personally, today I prefer to use VMs.

-- 
Jerry Feldman<gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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