Problem with salix. Grub2 culprit
 

After a lot of fight against Grub2 and questions not answered in other forums, I come here to ask for help at wise people of LQ. I hope this is the correct sub-forum.

My computer has two Linux OS inside: aptosid, a Debian derivative, and Salix, a Slackware based, as you know. As a consequence of an aptosid's dist-upgrade, I cannot boot salix.

It is, obviously, a Grub2 issue, which is the bootmanager of aptosid, having salix as second OS. In my battles with Grub2 I've learned (in some forum; don't ask me what forum, I don't remember) that the script /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober is not always reliable. Because that, I've annulled the mode "x" of this script and configured 40_custom instead. Here is as it looks now:

As far as I'm able to see, this configuration must go, but if I try to boot Salix-Slackware 13.37, I get:
For more information I've run bootinfoscript, which results are here

Any advice will be very appreciated.

Rip van Vinkle

This is a Slackware forum. Slackware is not Salix. Slackware also does not contain grub2. Perhaps you are better off finding help in the Salix forum : http://www.salixos.org/forum/

Eric

Apologies if I've bothered you. I think you don't need to be impolite.

Of course, I've asked at salix forum, but nobody could find a solution. If salix is a derivative of Slackware, then the knowledge of Slackware is applicable to salix.

And in the first paragraph I've said "I hope this is the correct sub-forum". If not, please said me what other subforum is.

The response you got looked pretty factual to me.

Not when you're asking about a component that Slackware has never included. Obviously that wouldn't be derived from Slackware in any way.

I have no idea. Good luck with your search for an answer, though.

I would ask in Linux General (this reads like a Grub2 issue). The Slackware forum is the least appropriate IMHO given that Slackware is one of the few that does not include/use Grub2.

Rip van Vinkle,

I published here my experience concerning GRUB2 in Linux Mint and LILO in Slackware Linux.

Since Salix is a derivative of Slackware I assume it uses LILO. LILO is much more reliable – in my opinion – than GRUB. So you could try to install LILO on MBR and GRUB Legacy on the partition with aptosid using the method that I described in the mentioned post. Then use LILO to run both your systems. That should work.

Yup, I'd say grub2 or aptosid issue, as, like Slackware, Salix uses lilo, rather than grub.

eyeofliberty,

The issue which I described in the mentioned post concerns GRUB2 in Linux Mint. I think that the similar method will solve the problem with GRUB2 in aptosid.

Have you actually tried using os-prober, or did you just assume it wouldn't work because someone said it wouldn't?

One of the nice things about grub and grub2 is that you can interactively run boot loader commands during the boot so that you can figure out exactly what's wrong with your configuration file and boot the system so you can make the changes. Win win!

Judging from the error message, I'd advise you to put the boot process in interactive mode and list out your disk partitions. I'm pretty sure that (hd0,msdos3) isn't correct (or isn't an ext2 partition).

An altogether unsatisfactory and unhelpful thread until that last post.
By the time the message the OP sees is issued the boot-loader (whatever it is) has done it's job. That is a kernel message from a Slackware derived distro. You'd think the Slack community would try to help, but apparently not.

Unless things are different in Salix, you will need to include an initrd to get all the support pre-loaded for the kernel. Add it immediately after the kernel line.
That grub setup does look a mess - open another thread for that if you want; general as suggested will probably be a better choice.

We don't ship grub2. The kernel message (almost certainly not our kernel, either) is simply saying that it couldn't mount root, very likely because the initrd or the boot loader were not set up properly. I don't know, but suspect that the initrd construction is different from what we do as well.

Salix may have forked from Slackware, but it differs in a lot of ways. This is one of them.

Sorry you weren't satified, but asking for support in the wrong place (from a project that has nothing to do with the software in question) isn't likely to produce helpful answers.

They (SalixOS) use a huge kernel by default and do not encourage (in any of their documentation) the use of a generic kernel with initrd (so I suspect most users do not bother). That all said, I fully agree that this isn't the right forum and should either be in general or in Salix's own forum.

I would agree. According to your Boot Info script, that's a swap partition. Your salix root partition is on the second hard drive (hd1,3), not the first (hd0,3).

I would recommend you revisit/reevaluate the documentation used to create your custom entry. Or run os-prober and let that take care of it for you.

Finally, a salix mate has advised me in the right way.

Thanks to everybody who has tried to help me.

Van Vinkle

Well, sorry, but no it didn't (fork), no it doesn't (differ) and no it (grub2) isn't.

Salix does not use grub2, exactly like slackware does not use grub2. Salix uses LILO, just like slackware uses LILO. And exactly the same kernel too. This particular user wanted to use grub2 though.

That said, I agree, this is not the place to talk about this problem.

Well, a couple of differences are that Mr. Volkerding doesn't develop Salix nor does he support it.

Anyone said he did?

Even the Salix website says that they are based on Slackware. How is that not a fork?
If I'm not mistaken, they do provide an official grub2 binary package. At this time, we do not.
Interesting that they use the exact same kernel. I'm surprised they do. Sorry for the false assumption... I'm not a Salix expert.

Agreed there.

You did, by claiming the two distros were not different.

That's the difference. It is based on Slackware, it's not a fork of Slackware.

Salix in no way did anything like this. Salix development is 100% based on Slackware development and is definitely not independent. It just adds a package repository with more packages on top of the Slackware package repository (not replacing it, the Slackware repositories are used directly). If you change something in Slackware, it will immediately affect Salix users exactly as it will affect Slackware users.

No, Salix 14.0 at this time does not include a grub2 package in the repositories. And there has never even been a choice during installation about it. It's either LILO or nothing, just like with Slackware.

Nothing surprising about that really. Everything is exactly the same in Slackware and in Salix (well, almost: http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.ph...from_Slackware, but still those can be overriden and a user can choose the Slackware ones any time)


They are not the same thing, but at the same time they are not different in any way that matters. Every technical aspect is the same, Salix just adds some stuff on top of it (like dependency resolution), but in no way the "Slackware way" is blocked or replaced by force. Same kernel, same glibc, same package management tools, same package, same eveerything... As I wrote above, if Pat decides to break/fix something in Slackware, it will also immediately break/be fixed in Salix. That doesn't make him responsible for it though.

Salix 13.37 had grub2 in its "A" series, so Pat was correct in his statement that Salix offered an official grub2 package. No idea why it was again dropped for Salix 14.0.

Eric

Yes, I can see how that could be misunderstood. Consider everything in salix/a as being in extra/a. Everything in the salix repositories are actually extra packages. Being in the "A" series doesn't make it any different than being in any other series, by no way it means something like "it should always be installed and be part of any installation". As I wrote before, grub2 was never included in any salix installation as standard. Users could install grub2 (like any other package) from the repositories after installation, but that's not much more different than a slackware user installing grub2 after installation using SBo, or some prebuilt package from another source.

I've been using Salix for some time, out of curiosity, as well as a mix of Slackware and Salix. So I can confirm Salix is truly based on Slackware (it uses the Slackware online repos), with a few addons (slapt-get, spkg), a few minor tweaks to base packages (ntp, sysvinit-scripts) and lots of software in their repos. They're a friendly bunch, and they're doing some nice work.

Vanilla Slackware is my OS of choice but IMHO the Slackware ecosystem is richer for having Salix around. It is certainly far superior to Vector, Zenwalk and others that are based on Slackware, as they try harder not to deviate so it is possible to use make use of their work without having to fully commit to everything. Though I no longer have an actual Salix install (I used it on an eeePC for a while), like you I use some packages from the Salix repository. It is a great source of binary packages (gapan himself is the maintainer of a very large number of their packages). Occasionally I also read and comment on their forums and agree they nice, friendly and helpful people. As such I frequently recommend SalixOS to others.

Sorry, I know I am going off topic now but I felt I needed to say that. ;)