I have dual and triple booted linux with assorted Windows a few times. It surprised me how relatively easy it was.
I thought dual+ booting linux/linux+ would be even easier, even perhaps with no input from me. (obvious newb).

Will someone please point me towards the info for linux/linux/(linux) booting. Hopefully generic as I have several flavors I'd like to try.

If specifics are needed my main OS will be mandrake 9.2 (for now anyway)
Others: Morphix, Knoppix, Jamd, Free BSD, peanut and hopefully a few more if I can get my hands on them.

While were here, just how much is knoppix like debian when install to hard drive? (Did I get this last question right?).

Continued gratitude to all those who help us newbies.

The only thing i know about knoppix is it messed up my slackware when i tried to bootup from it. and I HIGHLY suggest you try slackware. Its a good way to learn (its how i did) the bare bones of *nix w/out the nice GUI menus.

As for duel booting, i would recommend making linux your MBR (master boot record) in your computer, there should be a file called lilo.conf (if your using lilo) Just look at some previous settings and you should know what to do.

btw, to find lilo.conf do something like this "cd \;find -name lilo*"

I dual boot Mandrake 9.1, Gentoo 1.4 and for a while Mandrake 9.2 as well. I recommend you use Grub for your bootloader. You run into some issues running lilo after configuring it.

With Grub it just looks for it and if it is not there, it will tell you and you can edit it without booting into another Linux.

It was/is hard for me to figure out Grub partition scheme but I would not go back to lilo and boot multiple OSs.

My 2c worth

Thanks,
I havnt yet found my lilo.config file.
Ill try grub if its better for tripple booting. Can I switch bootloaders mid stream or can I only choose it during an Install?

With linux/windows tripple boot I knew to install the oldest windows 1st and linux last. After that the bootloader seemed to recognize Windows and linux during the installation and gave me the correct boot options automatically.

I haven't had to manually configure loader before.

What Ive done so far is installed jamd 1st then mandrake 2nd, but mandrake doesn't seem to show the jamd partitions that I can find using nautilus (the way it did with windows partitions when I had them) and I'm not given any other options at boot except the standard 1 system stuff.

Continued gratitude to allthose who help us newbies

Oh boy, another southerner.

Mandrake Control Center then click boot then DrakBoot. When the screen comes up click the configure button in the upper right portion of the screen. In the next screen click on the pull down menu for 'Bootloader to use' and select Grub. Don't change anything else unless you know it is wrong. Click OK till you get back to Mandrake Control Center. Then close it.

That should get Grub installed. It may ask for the CD when it changes over.

The bootloader will look different. If you get a error just hit any key and then select another OS or hit 'e' to edit the entry then enter then 'b' to boot into it.

They both have advantages but since I started multi booting, grub has shined in my opinion.

Hope that helps.



Oh, lilo's conf file is usually in the /etc directory named lilo.conf. Grub is in /boot/grub and named menu.1st.

ALWAYS install windoze first. It will erase the bootloader. As a matter of fact, make a boot disk so you can get it back. Never had to do it before. I don't use windoze.

I don't have a boot disk either. I have made them but they never work.

Later

Thanks,
I am not trying to multiboot (thanks for the term) with windows.
Only linux flavors.

When I changed my bootloader to Grub (on my host) and rebooted to see what I could see, I lost Internet access from my client. MCC indicates my lan is still up, but internet not accessible from client>

Has anyone seen this happen before. Do I need same bootloader on both puters?

Bootloader shouldn't have anything to do with that. I was having trouble with accessing some sites earlier. May be something going on with a bug or something. I couldn't even get to this site. I was getting e-mails that others was posting to this site but it would not respond for me even with ping or traceroute.

May want to wait a bit and try again.

I've multi-booted as many as five distros spanned over two hard drives (before I saw the light and chose Slackware!), and I found the easiest way by far to boot 'em all was to use xosl - don't have a url at the moment, but a google search will bring it up.

It's freeware, lives in a tiny FAT partition at the start of your hard drive, and adding a new distro to boot is a simple point n' click operation. Only thing you have to remember is to install Lilo (or Grub, it does'nt seem to care which ) to the root partition.

Best bootloader I've ever tried.

http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4829

From what I've been reading it seemed that mandy 9.2 in particular may have a problem with linux/linux dual booting.
I wound up using the info in the above thread to get mandrake 9.2 / jamd dual boot going.
I looked at xosl but the directions for setting it up scared me pretty severly (the newbie that I am).
I have only tried what I've stated so far as I just got it going this evening, and dont want to start any thing new right now because I am scheduled to get dsl installed tomorrow and dont want to have things buggered up when the installer gets here. I am going to try tripple booting as soon as I can with the "chain" method that I've started dual booting with.

Continued gratitude to all those who help us newbies

Use grub I have successfully multibooted several distros with it before. It is not hard to configure, you can edit it on boot, & you don't have to run lilo after every change. I've been happy with grub since the first time I installed it and wouldn't go back to lilo. I've used xosl with success also but I prefer grub.

Haha got to learn to pay attention to thread dates