Dual/Triple boot System Assistance/Confirmation required...

[DannyE]

Hi All,

I might be being a bit too adventurous here but let me explain what I am trying to do:

• 1. Create Acronis TrueImage of my current HDD
  2. Create 8 Partitions on a 120Gb harddisk to contain the OSs (Win XP, Fedora 7 or Ubuntu GG, Solaris 10) using fdisk or Bootit NG or similar...
  • a. main WinXP partition (approx 20Gb)
    b. 'data' partition for WinXP to hold all my docs etc that I don't want to overwrite with a re-install of XP(approx 20Gb)
    c. swapfile partition for Linux distro ( ?Gb (I have 1Gb RAM))
    d. root for Linux distro (~15Gb)
    e. 'data' partiton for Linux distro (~20Gb)
    f. swapfile partition for Solaris, at least I think it needs one like Linux does?? ( ?Gb (I have 1Gb RAM))
    g. root for Solaris (~15Gb)
    h. 'data' partiton for Solaris (~20Gb)
  3. Put XP back on new HDD
  4. Install Linux Distro on relevant partitions (should include the multi-boot utility)
  5. Install Solaris on relevant partitions...

Unfortunately my curiosity regarding Solaris outweighs my knowledge so I'm not sure if this will work (having checked Sun's Solaris Hardware Compatibility list, my X31 should work, but not sure if it will in conjunction with other OSs)...

Reservations I have:

• 1. would using the X31 recover disks wipeout the extra partitions should I ever need to use it?
  2. can I safely remove the hidden partition (X31 recovery whatsit)?
  3. will the linux multi-boot (Grub I think on Fedora at least) recognise Solaris if I install it after Linux?

Does anyone out there have any experience.advice they could offer me on this? Any triple boot advice would probably help...

Also while I am here, are there any of the IBM components (IBM Messages etc) that I could remove from my WinXP setup that might free up resources to make for a speedier machine?

Many thanks,

Dan

[DVormann]

c. swapfile partition for Linux distro ( ?Gb (I have 1Gb RAM))

As a general rule swap=2*RAM. 2 GB swap in your case.

1. would using the X31 recover disks wipeout the extra partitions should I ever need to use it?

Yes.

2. can I safely remove the hidden partition (X31 recovery whatsit)?

If you have original recovery-CDs from IBM you can always recreate that partition. Wiping everything else out, of course.

3. will the linux multi-boot (Grub I think on Fedora at least) recognise Solaris if I install it after Linux?

Not by default. I am pretty certain you can tell GRUB what else there is to boot. No idea how, though.

[carbon_unit]

I don't know for sure about Solaris but most linux distros can share the "swap" partition and the "/home" partition. Then you just have a separate "/" partition for each distro.

To add distros to grub you have to edit the /boot.grub/menu.list file

[DannyE]

Thanks for the replies... I haven't chance to give it a go tonight (probably wait until the weekend incase I stuff things up!!).

I think I'll put the Linux distro on last and hopefully then it will pick up Solaris like it does Win XP.

I'm pleased to see there weren't any hexes put on me for trying Solaris So hopefully that means I'm not completely nuts

I think if I take an image of my original drive and regularly take them I shouldn't need the recovery disks and so hopefully won't need the recovery set all being well

Ooh... Any ideas what IBM bagage I can remove in order to streamline my Win XP install?

Thanks again for putting some of my fears to rest!

Dan

[DVormann]

Ooh... Any ideas what IBM bagage I can remove in order to streamline my Win XP install?

During my last clean install of XP on X41 I used only

• * all hardware and special key drivers
  * power manager (you can go without and use the built-in windows stuff)
  * easy eject (only with docking station, useless otherwise)
  * PC-Doctor
  * RecordNow
  * WinDVD (will probably remove it soon)

Did not use HDD protection (does your X31 support that?) due to CF replacement. With actual HDD it is essential.

[DannyE]

Thanks for the reply, I'll make a note of those ready for when I do a re-install

Best regards,

Dan

[mazzinia]

I guess I'm a little late posting but... have you taken into consideration using vmware to host the other 2 OS ?
The X31 has not a particular 3D card so you would not really lose something....

[mfbernstein]

Solaris and Grub will play fine together. It is probably easiest to install Linux last though, so there is no danger of Grub being overwritten.

Linux and Solaris do use the same ID for their swap partitions, but attempting to share may not work well. You can share an ext3-formatted /home however, assuming you use OpenSolaris, or install the ext3 drivers in Solaris.

[DannyE]

Funnily enough I downloaded the VMWare version of OpenSolaris 10 Express Developer Edition just incase I can't get the triple boot option going My only concern is that my x31 is only a 1.4 P M with 1Gb RAM so running VMWare versions might be a bit slow... Also I only have VMWare Player so if the configuration doesn't match the X31, I guess it won't work to well?

mfbernstein:

Is it possible to give the swap partitions different IDs? I intend to keep Fedora and Solaris completely seperate, just incase there are any ptoblems. I am going to be using OpenSolaris but I think for the time being until I get a bit more experienced, I'll keep the /homes seperate.

*EDIT*

Just read from that link that Linux Grub doesn't see Solaris?? So I should use the Solaris Grub instead I think so install OpenSolaris last... Or is it refering to proper Solaris and OpenSolaris should be OK?

*/EDIT*

This is quite adventurous for me as I've only installed Fedora 6 alongside Win2K before (couldn't get a belkin wireless PCMCIA card to work though in Fedora) on a Compaq n600c PIII M.

I've got myself a brand new 120Gb drive so I should have plenty of room for the 3 OSs...

Anyway I shall be starting the process later today so I hopefully will reporting back good news later

Thanks again for all the comments, very much appreciated!

Dan

[mfbernstein]

Actually, you're correct, I misread the article. Linux GRUB may not boot Solaris (I've seen conflicting reports) but Solaris GRUB can boot Linux. So install Solaris last.

Regarding swap, make sure to put the Linux swap partition before the Solaris partition. You only need to make 1 Solaris partition because Solaris uses partition 'slices' (essentially subpartitions, but in the MBR, it appears as just one large partition), so from the Solaris installer, you'll split that partition into /, swap (and if you want, /home).

For VMWare, you're going to want to upgrade to 2GB of RAM, but otherwise performance should be acceptable, if not great. You can also use the free VMWare Server to configure your virtual machines, and then reopen them in VMWare Player (virtual machine configurations are stored in text files, so many changes can be done manually too).

VMWare installs are typically much easier than installs on bare hardware, so unless you have a particular need to run Solaris directly, this may be something to try.

[DannyE]

Well this morning I have used Acronis True image and have put my new drive into my X31 (did a straight clone from old drive with no resizing so has approx 34Gb of the 111Gb available space) and all appears to be working well, I wouldn't have thought it would have been so easy but here I am typing on it

Next up; Fedora 8 install!!

Back soon,

Dan

[DannyE]

OK so everything was going well and managed to set up the partitions leaving about 40Gb free for Solaris, booted into Fedora and it was looking good, except...

The Wireless Connection

I have a Netgear DG834G setup with WPA-PSK.

The X31 has an Atheros AR5212 802.11abg which appears to be detected fine.

I have set the mode of the connection to 'Managed'
I have given it the correct SSID
Set the channel
Set transfer rates to Auto
And entered my pre-shared-key

There doesn't seem to be a place to stipulate the type of encryption though.

If I save the changes and try to connect, it says it can't activate the wlan0 (Atheros Card)... Strangely the Network Device Control application doesn't appear to load and I suspect this is where my issue could be solved?

I have tried this twice now and each time it has caused fedora to lock when booting up and because I don't know any better, have had to re-install (I presume there are safe modes but I don't know how to boot into them).

Any ideas out there?

Many thanks as always...

Dan

[mazzinia]

Ehm... I know it's not an answer to your question but... have you considered to use another linux distro?
Ubuntu/Suse would be better alternatives to fedora, theorically.
(or CentOS ...)

[DannyE]

After spending several hours downloading fedora I was trying to do it justice especially as I had found it ok to use before... but after not making much headway today, I think I m going to give another distro a whirl...

Bearing in mind that I am a relatively new user of Linux, but from a development background what distro would you recommend? I prefer speed over masses of gizmos, but a few games would be nice and an mp3 player...

I've tried Suse before on an Acer Aspire I had at the time, not very successfully, I am curios about Ubuntu but I don't really know much about centOS at all...

Any advice very gratefully received

Dan

[mazzinia]

CentOS is exactly the Red Hat Enterprise, only it's free (they are forced to distribute the source of all the Enterprise package, and an independent group is compiling and distributing them since various time).

I've seen the last Ubuntu (live cd actually) run correctly on the notebook of a friend (old acer centrino), and it included wifi with security, etc, working immediately without problems.

Suse... don't know. I've tried it and liked, too. But I've not tried the last 2 releases.

[mfbernstein]

Second the suggestion for Ubuntu. No Linux distro. is perfect, but in terms of out-of-the-box usefulness, Ubuntu is pretty good.

[DannyE]

Hi,

I downloaded a live CD version of the Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD and everything looked fine but again, it doesn't work correctly with the Atheros wifi. I can enter all the wireless information but I think the card is the sticking point...

I looked a the properties and it gives me all the right information except it doesn't actually know what the card is (this is probably the same problem that Fedora had but it didn't give me as much information).

I don't have the info infront of me at the moment but I will post it later when I get home...

Has anyone else had problems with the Atheros card and Linux. I really want to be able to say that Linux is as easy as Windows to get up and running as I am a bit sick of all the windows fanbois saying you can't get a linux distro to work without being some sort of uber geek and have to do lots of in depth command line stuff which I am sure is untrue in many cases...

Many thanks,

Dan

[aboveliquidice]

Just as a point of trouble shooting - it may be useful to remove all of the locks you have on your wireless - shutoff WEP and MAC filtering

That way - you can ensure that your card is definitely not working (instead of a configuration issue)

~above~

[carbon_unit]

I have Kubuntu 7.10 on my T60 with an Atheros card and it works fine with WPA. The only config I had to do was put in the WPA key. I haven't tried regular Ubuntu.

[DannyE]

I found a 'madwifi' driver rpm for the atheros ar5212 and that seemed to work fine...

However in all the excitement I went ahead and installed Solaris 10 express developer edition as well which now appears to have been a mistake as Grub doesn't list Fedora anymore... Also couldn't get Solaris to load in anything other than CDE, neither Gnome or Java Desktop appeared to work...

I think I am going to do a reclone and then put Fedora back on and leave it dual boot, at least I am getting to grips with Fedora

I'll come back to Solaris another time...

Dan

[aboveliquidice]

You know - if complex setups like this were easy - they wouldn't be nearly as satisfying... hahah

Back in the day - I had a Red Hat 7 + Suse + windows...

Good luck - and enjoy

~above~

[mfbernstein]

Has anyone else had problems with the Atheros card and Linux. I really want to be able to say that Linux is as easy as Windows to get up and running as I am a bit sick of all the windows fanbois saying you can't get a linux distro to work without being some sort of uber geek and have to do lots of in depth command line stuff which I am sure is untrue in many cases...

Many thanks,

Dan

You'll have much better luck with ndiswrapper, I suspect. You'll need the Windows drivers for your specific card. Regardless, Linux WiFi is pretty hit or miss.

If you give us the PCI device ID for the Atheros, it may be possible to figure out why the madwifi drivers haven't worked.

[DannyE]

mfbernstein : The standard drivers that installed with Fedora 8 didn't work but when I installed the madwifi ones, they did... However a word of warning...

Having had to re-install Fedora after Solaris lost it (wiped off Solaris as well, one new OS is enough to learn for now I've decided ) I had the madwifi driver on a CF card inserted into the X31 so after the fresh install I thought I could happily run the rpm from the CF card and all would be hunky dory except that in installing the rpm, Fedora requires the insertion of the Fedora install dvd AND an active internet connection to check dependancies etc...

I sighed and played some Mah Jong instead...

Anyway I will run the rpm tonight while connected via a wired connection and all should be well with me and my X31

I see what you mean about wifi being a bit hit n miss... Fedora reported only 39% strength (only a couple of bits of 12mm plasterboard between me and the router) while Win XP reports 80% plus...

BTW - does anyone know how to stop Fedora trying to get IP information from the wlan0 during boot up as it causes the boot up to hang for a good while?

Many thanks,

Dan

[ragefury32]

Actually, my production X31 at work tri-boots off Fedora Core 7, OSX 10.4.8 and Vista Enterprise. The X31s are actually pretty trivial/straightforward when you set them up that way. Here's some things that i would recommend if you want to attempt multi-boot.

a) Windows goes in first. Vista is usually pretty good when it comes to the bootloader, but keep the install media handy. That should be the first third of the drive.
b) OSX needs more polish in that regard, but they usually usually go in second in its own partition. You want it to be the last third.
c) Linux goes in last, make sure you do not format it with LVM support.
This will go in the middle.

When setting up grub, have grub sit on the boot sector, overwriting the Windows bootloader, and use a chainloader to hit the OSX partition (OSX has a boot menu option to chainload further, and it can load Vista or XP that way). The reason not to install LVM for the Linux partition? It's so both OSX and Windows can access it read-write. Windows can do it via an IFS, and OSX can do it natively. As for NTFS read/write, Linux can do fuse/NTFS-3g, as can OSX. As for hfs+ access to hit the OSX partition? Linux has read/write, and Windows can use macDrive.

As for Virtualization on the X31/32, I don't recommend it. The Pentium-Ms are not capable of virtualization the way the Cores are, and since they only support up to SSE2, some of the fancier memory move operations that work well in virtualization does not work as well.

The Atheros card from IBM should work right off the bat - in fact, mine works in all 3 partitions in all 3 OSes. The Linux user interface for it is kinda bad, though. I am going to an Atheros b/g/draft-n card from SparkLAN though.

Oh yeah, if you are running Fedora, install Beryl/Compiz Fusion on your machine, and make sure it's on by default with the Cube enabled. Possibly one of the most pretty and useful things you can run on the '31. I constantly get people asking me about it when I rotate screen real estate - definitely more useful than Vista's AeroGlass.

[pgoelz]

FWIW, you might want to try PCLinuxOS. I have tried quite a few distros (including Ubuntu Studio) and PCLinuxOS was by far the best right out of the box. The kernal in the distro needed NDISWRAPPER to run my WMP54G PCI wireless card but once that was set up, it worked great. After I upgraded the kernal, even that was no longer needed. And I tried running the live CD on my X41 and EVERYTHING worked right out of the box.... wireless, bluetooth, keyboard light, battery info.... everything. I closed the lid and it went into standby. The only thing that didn't work was when I opened the lid it didn't resume correctly.... not sure if that was because it was running from the live CD or what.

I've been playing with PCLinuxOS for a couple weeks now and so far I haven't been able to break it. The only caution is that Grub tends to get the partition numbers wrong in my situation. I have Windows on the first hard drive and three Linux distros on the second hard drive. Grub seems to get the partition numbers wrong for any Linux that it isn't currently running from and I have to manually edit menu.lst.

I hated Ubuntu, BTW. Fiddly to get anything to work and many configuration changes apparently are still done from the command line. There didn't seem to be GUIs for configuration tasks.

Paul

[DannyE]

Hi all,

After removing Solaris and reinstalling Fedora 8 (with LVM support, seems to work OK) all seemed to be fine, even the wireless was working fine.

However...

I had Compiz Fusion working with the Emerald themes and after running 'emerald --replace' in a terminal window to get the themes to work, it was all going fine... Unfortunately after loggin out and back in again, the Emerald themes won't show up. I've tried adding references in the sessions for the commands 'compiz --replace' and 'emerald --replace' but they just won't start up. Oddly if I go into Desktop effects (I think, going from memory as my X31 is at home and I'm not)... the graphics card doesn't show up as ati mobility m6, but it does elsewhere, could this be affecting it?

Also after being able to use the wireless for several sessions, it now won't connect eventhough the settings on the router haven't changed, it will connect when booted up to winxp. My other win2k laptop, (Compaq n600c) and work winxp laptop, (Dell Latitude d620) can both connect fine...

If I boot with a Ubuntu LiveCD the wireless works fine. i have tried re-installing the madwifi driver that I used originaly to get it to work but I don't think its a driver problem now...

Any ideas?

Many thanks,

Dan

P.S. My keyboard light works fine!!