Hi there,

Like everybody here I am a distro hopper and honestly I think that is a fun thing to do if you have a 20GB spare partition. The major distro I use is Debian Etch.

Now what I do here is I decide to install Suse CD tht I downloaded and I find it fun. The graphics are great and I agree to this being 'Rolls Roys Linux'. Later I get my hands on Suse DVD and I install it. And that is where the problem starts. The grub malfunctions. I am able to boot into Suse but when I try to boot into Debian it gives me 'error 15 : file not found'. I rerun the grub of Debian and I can boot into Debian but then not in Suse. I reinstall Suse - no go. I cant still boot into Debian.

I then drove over to a friends house and got another suse DVD - no go

I then installed Suse thr' the CD. Checked if Debain still comes up and it was well. Then I booted up Suse DVD and used it as an upgrade media ( got no internet at home ). Grub works fine but the I get this 'kio_file' error whenever I try to run any applications. So now I am really frustrated and cornered.

I take a full backup and then I try to install Suse first and Debian later ( this takes a long time and all I am doing is wasting electricity and adding to global warming ) - still ended up with the grub issue.

After some thought I decided to install Suse on my hard drive as the only OS. This worked just fine but then amarok refused to play mp3s. That was it. I took the entire application off.

And then I installed Debian and Mandivra. Tht made my pc perfect again.

I should say here tht not all of us have access to the internet at home. So in case there is a software provided - it should work without any addons or downloads.

What version of Debian did you install. I had similar problems between CentOS and Debian Lenny. In the end I had to install the Debian grub onto the Debian root partition and then chainload from the CentOS grub. As for distros with multimedia codecs by default, take a look at Mandriva Powerpack and Linux Mint.

Hi,

I used Debian Etch 4.0. Honestly speaking there is nothing Debian cannot do for me.

Anyway I was googling on the topic and seems like that is a very common issue. But all the articles I read were abt Vista and suse - havent yet come across a Linux distro and suse though.

I also tried to repair the Suse grub thr' the DVD but that too did not work. The repair manager could find both the root partitions (debian/suse) but could only boot up one.

If you are going to keep a 20 gig partition to change distros in you need to change your boot/grub/menu.lst to chainload that partition using Other for title. Then at each installation on that partition make sure the boot loader is installed in the root directory of that distro.

Thanks for the reply so soon sir.

But honestly I do not understand what you are asking me to do. I am nor very experienced with Linux (and chainloaders drive me nuts).

Lets take it from here. say I install Suse then wht changes do I need to make to the grub.


Thanks a lot.

Assuming you have one drive, Debian on the first partition (sda1) and the second partition (sda2) your spare 20GB partition for experimenting, you need this entry in your Debian Grub.

title Other
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Other
root (hd0,1)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst

Both should work but the first is simpler. If this isn't your setup, you need to make the appropriate changes in entries by looking at output of fdisk -l command.

Hey,

It worked !!!!!!


Thanks all of you guys.

To get your mp3s to work look under the Suse forums sticky and follow the directions for "installing full multimedia capabilities for 10.2". That should get you in the ball park so to speak.

Or here for one click install: http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats/