Hi,

I'm a primary Slackware user who wanted to try out some other distributions. I checked them out on VMWare first, but then thought I'd like to mess around with them some more (without sharing resources) so I decided to quad boot. I've got the following setup:

hda
hda1 - SUSE (Bootable, LILO installed to partition)
hda2 - WINXP (Bootable, LILO installed to partition)
hda3 - UBUNTU (Bootable, LILO installed to partition)
hda4 - EXTENDED
hda5 - SLACKWARE (Bootable, LILO installed to MBR)
hda6 - LINUX SHARED SPACE
hda7 - WINDOWS SHARED SPACE (NTFS)
hda8 - WINDOWS SHARED SPACE (FAT32)
hda9 - SWAP

All distributions are the latest version. SUSE is 10, Slackware is 10.2, Ubuntu is ... whatever the latest stable is as of a week ago. I have used it the least so far so I don't know for sure.

This went fairly well, but I did have problems getting SUSE and Ubuntu to boot. I had to turn
ACPI off for both of them. Otherwise, they froze up. However, being on a laptop, I would like to avoid this. Does anyone know of a specific issue that would require this? Will I have to recompile the kernel or is there any reason I just wouldn't be able to do it in this situation? For what it's worth, Slackware uses bareacpi.i for booting and it works fine.

Lastly, when I select to boot Ubuntu from LILO at startup it boots up in console instead of GUI. I installed twice and it always starts up this way (as opposed to the GUI startup and progress bar when installed alone). I would prefer the GUI option, if possible. Can anyone give me any pointers?

I don't mind reading, but I've had some problems finding why the ACPI isn't working for two distros and why the Ubuntu startup is console.

Thanks in advance for your time and/or help.

-SlackSuseUbuntuTastic

I can't help you with the ACPI issue, but Ubuntu is probably installed by default to boot into runlevel 3. To verify, boot into any of the linux distros (including Ubuntu) and edit this file in Ubuntu: /etc/inittab.

Look for this:
# The default runlevel is defined here
id:3:initdefault:

Change it to this:
# The default runlevel is defined here
id:5:initdefault:

Save the file and re-boot into Ubuntu. You should go to runlevel 5 (GUI).

Hi bigrigdriver!

Thanks for the help. I didn't describe my situation all that well. Ubuntu starts up the GUI login and GUI desktop, but normally it also displays a GUI instead of all the boot messages.

That's what isn't showing up.