Triple boot with 'odd' OS under LILO
 

Hi all,

I'm currently planning a new install of Linux and I'm interested in setting up a main Slackware Linux partition, a Windows XP partition and a third partition for 'other' OSes. To give me some practise with installing and running other OSes, I'm interested in trying out stuff such as Minix, *BSD, Solaris, Plan9, other misc Linux distros and anything else I can get my hands on.

I have two HDs, one 80gb SATA drive and one 120gb IDE drive. I was intending to put Slackware Linux and Windows XP on the SATA drive, and free up the space on the IDE drive for the Third partition. Mainly because some of these OSes I'm interested in trying don't have much support for SATA disks.

Does anyone have any experience of doing this? Can you do this under LILO? If not can someone recommend me a bootloader that would?

I've looked around on google, but there doesn't seem to be much info on triple boots with odd systems. Plenty on dual linux/win boots however :)

Thanks in advance for any help,

Matt

ok i had similar system only with 3 odd os's on one hdd.
first you have to install windows, than the slack on the partition under same hdd. edit lilo.conf to look something like this :
#for slack
image=/boot/blabla
label=slack
read-only
root=/dev/blabla
initrd=/boot/blabla.gz
#for win
other=/dev/blabla2
label=win
#other optional stuff

now, when you install second linux os - do not use lilo when prompted, just skip that part of installation. when you finish installation reboot in slack , then mount new os and cp /boot/vmlinuz from new os to /boot/newname in slack. than append to lilo.conf :
image=/boot/newname
label=e.g. debian
root=/dev/newdisk
read-only
#other optional stuff see man lilo.conf

that's it ! type lilo when you done to apply changes
hope it helps

That sounds good thanks. So basically you can use LILO to install pretty much any OS, providing you tell it where to look for a boot image?

I think I'm going to install XP first and then Slackware, making sure I leave a spare partion on my IDE drive about ~20gb in space. Then see what happens when I try to install something new :)

you've got it
catch is that you do not use lilo when installing second (or third or...) linux, but to do it later ( cp and the rest )

So just to confirm, you'd install the 3rd OS and then once installed close it down, reboot into Slackware and then edit the lilo.conf to see the new OS?

That sounds cool, I think I can do that. Thanks for your help.