Boot Xandros from existing GRUB setup (NOT)

pixellany · 10-20-2006, 08:23 PM

I have confirmed this on 2 different machines.

Installed a demo version of Xandros home. During setup, it gives you a yes/no option on installing a bootloader (no option for a floppy). because I wanted to use my existing setup, I declined the bootloader.
After adding the normal entries to the existing grub.conf, Xandros would not boot.
Poking around, I find that Xandros installs initrd that is much smaller than typical (and which has a .gz extension). On my installs, initrd is usually ~ 5MByte or larger. The Xandros .gz file is 338K.

So, did Xandros get built to stop people like me--or is it just an artifact of some other design choice? I can speculate that they are totally focussed on the user who would never dream of having other Linuxes.
One other interesting point: When I let it install its loader (LILO), it detects the Windows install, but **NONE** of the other Linuxes.

bigrigdriver · 10-21-2006, 12:58 AM

Couldn't you install Xandros with LILO in the root partition, then add an entry to the grub config of one of the other distros, using the chainloader option to pass the boot process to Xandros and LILO?

Does Xandros offer an option of bootloader to MBR or root partition?

pixellany · 10-21-2006, 08:56 AM

Quote:

bigrigdriver]Couldn't you install Xandros with LILO in the root partition, then add an entry to the grub config of one of the other distros, using the chainloader option to pass the boot process to Xandros and LILO?

Yes--I'm sure you could. I am not used to doing it that way.

Quote:

Does Xandros offer an option of bootloader to MBR or root partition?

I think so..

One thing I am curious about--when using LILO, is initrd different? If not, then why does Xandros have the .gz initrd file.