Multiboot dvd problem suse and knoppix
 

:newbie: question

Hi all,
I've made lots of searches but come up with no explanation about adding two live dvd in one dvd. :(
I want to make a bootable DVD with Suse10 live and Knoppix 4.0 DVD editions together.
Is it possible? If so how?

Dunno. All I am aware of, is that the DVDs that come on the front of my Linux Format magazine, only ever have the one bootable distro - if/when they include more than one distro, you usually have to get something like smart bootloader to boot the second one.

Afterall, the system is going too see a bootable distro and try to boot it - unless you can tell it somehow which one you want to boot from the DVD!

regards

John

A very interesting question, indeed. It has me wondering if lilo, grub, or some other bootloader could be burned to the dvd first, with appropriate config file, then the iso images, and have the bootloader give you the option of which image to boot.

If you succeed, please share the knowledge.

omega_916 welcome to lq if this was your first post.

Indeed interesting question.
Do you know how to master / remaster say a knoppix live cd to start with?

What I am saying is you can approach the problem in 3 ways:

1) Find out if it is possible, or impossible. I do not know
2) Go ahead with trying to master a dual boot
3) Learn first about the simplest 1 distro and learn how this work
to see if you can learn enough about it

By all means share your findings

I see a half possible solution but a modern PC would be needed
Get 1 distro to start and then get XEN, vmware or whatever to launch
a linux within linux distro
I imagine this would work. You have 2 live distro, admittedly slower

To confirm, another non English language magazine come with dvd
with 1 live distro and the other distro are provided as ISO.

If I were you I would try say DSL + puppy linux, or DSL + knoppix,
or whatever so 1 distro at least is small.
I have no idea if it matters a lot if you take say 1 debian + 1 non-debian
(apart from the learning curve). I suppose it is a boot issue

I couldn't leave this one without trying to learn more about the technique. I found this one . Unstated, but suggested, is the possibility of configuring a bootloader to boot iso images, and burn the bootloader and Linux iso images to dvd.

Are you sure this is the right link?

I see stuff just about burning bootable iso.
I know you said unstated, but your brain works too fast for me

DVD+R(W):
dvd+rw-format -f /dev/sr0 # ONLY +RW (rewritable)
growisofs -R -J -Z /dev/sr0 /DIR #delete+write
mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/sr0; umount /mnt/sr0
growisofs -R -J -M /dev/sr0 /DIR #append
To use growisofs to write a pre-mastered ISO-image to a DVD:
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/sr0=image.iso

I apologize for not expressing myself more clearly. If you are not married or living with a woman, then you have no idea of the distractions that are possible (most of them are not pleasing after the honeymoon).

What I intended to infer is this: suppose the bootloader of choice is grub. As grub users know, the first stage is installed to the MBR, and the grub.conf or menu.lst tells grub where to find the rest of itself, and the OS to boot (sometimes with the chainloader +1 option).

Now, if the first stage were burned to dvd, with an appropriate config file to tell grub which iso to look into for the rest of itself (or a chainloader option to tell grub to hand the boot process over to another bootloader), then burn the distro iso images to the same dvd, it just might be possible to have one dvd with two isos to choose from on boot.

thanks

I figure now what you had in mind

The reason I was dubious was is that I do not know if grub can access an iso.
The grub version to come will / have ls and some new facilities

Would the iso need to be mounted on a loopback system first?

I use grub and never tried to make it boot an iso. Can it?

Yes it can. I used www.google.com/linux with the search keywords 'grub iso' and got this as the first return. Making a GRUB bootable cd-rom .

In fact, I got 242,000 returns from google.

To paraphrase an American idiom, 'Go google, young man'. Read, learn, try. If you fail or succeed, share your knowledge so that others do not repeat your failure, or so that others may also repeat your success.