Hi everybody, I'm from Spain. First post and first stupid question

I've got XP and Ubuntu 5.10 installed in my desktop. My /dev/hda is partitioned this way:

/dev/hda1 Windows XP
/dev/hda2 Swap
/dev/hda3 /
/dev/hda5 /home
/dev/hda6 free

I tried to install Frugalware 0.3 (DVD) in /dev/hda6 last night. I intended to install / on /dev/hda6 and use /dev/hda5 as home too. The installation went allright except one of the spanish additional lang-packages, it made my installation stop. So I deselect that package and went on. I installed grub on /dev/hda (overwriting Ubuntu's GRUB, my first error). When I rebooted the machine, I only had this error message:

GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB

So i boot the PC with a Live CD (Kanotix) and tried to restore my grub from there. I mount frugalware and chrooted to frugalware and tried

grub-install /dev/hda

but an error message appeared, telling me there were no such device. So I mounted Ubuntu instead, chrooted and everything went fine.

I rebooted my machine and Grub was Ok, but when I get to the login screen, my /home was broken. So, I must have made a mistake somewhere along the way.

Here are my two questions

1.) Is it possible to share /home? I mean, mount /home for two different distros in the same place. I can live without doing this, anyway.

2.) What have I have to do to get GRUB right?

Thanks in advance and apologises for my poor english.

To begin with, my humblest apologies for not being from Spain. :P

The home-question: you don't want that.. Perhaps it's useful for some of the config-files to be shared by the two distros, but on the whole you're only inviting your distribution to mess with your configuration files, and you wouldn't want ubuntu to overwrite that .vimrc you worked on for an entire night, would you? A reasonable solution is to auto-mount a partition with documents or multimedia (or both) in a subdirectory of your home directory. That way you won't be able to use e.g. thunderbird with both distros but at least you're not taking the risk of deleting all your mail with an upgrade.

As for the grub-thing: you have got that right, haven't you? The only thing you may need to do is add an entry for Frugalware in your menu.lst.

ooops, I edited my message, now it looks better

Thanks for your advice on /home. I haven't found too much documentation about this kind of options/choices.

I know, I was wondering the same question a week ago and couldn't find an easy answer either How about your grub-problem?

My main problem with grub, now that's restored, is what to write in the conf file, but I'll copy/paste the ubuntu entry I already have and change it to fit frugalware setup (dev and kernel). Don't know if it'll work, though, I'm really clumsy.

Mides 2+ metros y juegas al baloncesto, o eres un fan muy fan?

If your /home partition isn't working in ubuntu either (after the frugalware install) you may have (accidentally) formatted the partition during the frugalware install.

Sharing /home between installations will ony work faultlessly if you use different usernames. Otherwise you'll run into problems with specific program configurations specified in the hidden files in your /home/<username> directory.

The reason why Grub didn't install properly in frugalware may be that althought the grub bootloader was installed to the MBR but the grub.conf file it points to wasn't created.

Thank you, it's more or less fixed! Now I've got no sound in Frugalware, but that's a different story!

And no, I'm not a big fan of the basketball player (I just like him), but I was looking at his stats in nba.com when I opened my account in linuxquestion and that's the first nickname that came to my mind.