Hi folks.. is anyone here dual booting distros? I keep running into some issues:

my partitioning scheme is /dev/hda2 for Slack 9.1 and /dev/hda5 for Gentoo. /dev/hda3 is swap.

When I boot into Slack, I made a mount point for Gentoo to access those files:

Slack /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda2 /
/dev/hda5 /mnt/gentoo
/dev/hda3 swap

In Gentoo I did a similar thing /etc/fstab
/dev/hda2 /mnt/slackware
/dev/hda5 /
/dev/hda3 swap

Lilo is set up with the images and "root=/dev/hdx" so I can dual boot.

Now, for some reason my fstabs and lilos keep getting scrwed up, mainly by Gentoo.

Is there anything else I need to do to dual boot? This is the first time I've used Gentoo, I did a stage 1 but I'm really only up to the point of getting X server to work. For some reason my mouse/keyboard are unresponsive in X under Gentoo.

I can tell you that in my experience, all kernels need to be accessable from the partition in which you run lilo.

I run lilo from slack, and my /boot directory on /dev/hdb1 contains:

vmlinuz (Slack)
vmlinuz-2.6.1-1.65 (Fedora)
vmlinuz-2.6.1-gentoo-r1 (duh)

lilo.conf: (relevant sections only)

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hdb1
label = Slack
append="idebus=66"
read-only

image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.1-gentoo-r1
root = /dev/hdb2
label = Gentoo
append="idebus=66"
read-only

image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.1-1.65
root = /dev/hdb3
label = Fedora
append="idebus=66"
read-only


I have no problems with lilo or mount

bnice.. yes, I did have to do that as well, took some tinkering to figure it out..


Gentoo overwrites my lilo.conf sometimes though perhaps it's all of the updating. I don't yet understand why all of the commands are necessary as I'm just following along with their install directions.

I'm really trying to see if it's any faster than slack, but so far I've spent two days futzing with it and still can't get Gentoo to load xserver without taking forever and having my mouse and keyboard be unresponsive... ugh

I had similar problems with slackware and SuSE, slakware kept overwriting the SuSE lilo, in the end I gave up and used the slackware lilo. Its a bit of a messy/lazy way to do things but I haven't had any problems since so maybe you should just stick with using the gentoo installed lilo?

well I know I can get slack up and running, Gentoo is my issue so I might have to use one of their LILOs. I still need to toss winXP on it for when my wife needs the PC. That'll rewrite the MBR as well.

Slack is a very minimal install right now, just incase some config file goes screwy in Gentoo and I need another way to get access to Gentoo files.

IMHO, no.

Don't get me wrong - Gentoo is cool, and emerge is da bomb but...

The most satisfying Gentoo experience I've had was to do a stage 3 install then update the packages I used, otherwise it takes FOREVER to finish the install.

In the end, Slackware seems faster to me, plus upgrading to KDE3.2 was a snap - download packages from slackware-current on www.slackware.com, then run updatepkg kde*
BAM, it's done (bnice bows in respect to Patrick V.)

If you have a working X installed in slack, copy /etc/X11/XF86Config over to Gentoo's /etc/X11.

That worked flawlessly for me.

bnice..

copying over XF86Config file..good suggestion.

I've tried most of the big distros out there (RHAT, Mandy, SuSe, Debian) and Slack blows them all outta the water for both stability and speed. The last "big" one I wanted to try out was Gentoo because of their promises of full optimization. Slack 9.1 is already i686 optimized but it's not -pentium4 optimized. So far, Slack is blowing Gentoo outta the water as far as speed is concerned as well, even with my flags set in Gentoo for -pentium4 -O3 optimization and a couple others I saw on their forums.


As far as emerge being the bomb.. I included the other respositories listed on swaret's homepage so swaret also checks places like Linuxpackages and a few other repositories. It's a piece of cake to do a swaret --installpkg <blah>.

Just like emerge but it installs the binaries instead of compiling. Granted there may be more ebuilds available for emerge but swaret is pretty freaking slick..