For what is it to die…
June 9th, 2008 by timelady
…But to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?
So, one of today’s adventures was finally making time to sort out my tablet PC - the magic TC1100 (which is souped up to 100GB hdd, and 1GB ram from original).
Now my ‘Xen’ boy is triple booting as desired : Windows XP, OpenSolaris & Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
The install process took a bit of figuring out. OpenSolaris does NOT like being installed on a fourth or later partition (I had three for Ubuntu previously - / and swap, and of course Windows on the first). So, I deleted Ubuntu and started again, (this is why we back up kids - tar up your home directory, as I do, or use whatever back up method suits:) ).
Now, my 100GB hdd looks like this -
primary partitions:
/dev/sda1 Windows XP
/dev/sda2 OpenSolaris
/dev/sda3 Ubuntu (mounted as / )
extended partition:
/dev/sda5 Swap
Next step was working out what boot loader I would use. OpenSolaris uses a very modified GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) to cope with zfs, so I would need to invoke that. From reading, I knew the preferred method was to install Ubuntu last, or reinstall the Ubuntu Grub, to then call the OpenSolaris Grub. That is the path I elected to choose - the one of least resistance:)
Therefore, with XP already installed, I installed OpenSolaris, checked both O/S booted fine, then installed Ubuntu. I checked that booted XP & Ubuntu fine, and then while in Ubuntu, modified that Grub to call up OpenSolaris Grub, (no modifications are necessary to the OpenSolaris Grub).
The file is /boot/grub/menu.lst, and the relevant parts are below.
title Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=94afe16b-8b92-4ff1-b038-a0cfe9c9f57b ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
quiet
title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
title OpenSolaris
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
savedefault
makeactive
Now I can boot into OpenSolaris in a slightly fiddly but working fine kind of way:) I will post more about my adventures as I go…next is reinstalling all the tablet niceties I had working so well on previous Ubuntu install.
Oh, and Kde4. Not a Gnome type, it is really a personal preference thing, so I tend to move to Kubuntu asap. Especially as I have Gnome to play with in OpenSolaris - or at least until I get Kde4 on that, too;)
