Sorry I'm at work in my lunchbreak if the details here aren't enough I will mail again when I get home...

I currently run Mandrake 9.1 and Win98SE. I have tried to set up a third OS, namely Gentoo 1.4. I thought that as I can download CD-ISOs optimised for Athlon-XP it may be faster. However will I be able to get all the multimedia support via PLF, carefully built difficult installs like GnuCash, etc.? One way to find out, try it!

The instructions from Gentoo looked daunting, but it turned out they are not that hard to follow. However I could not use Gentoo's suggested disk geometry as I have Mandrake on the same drive. I used Mandrake Control Centre to turn an unused 5Gb area of my 2nd Hard Drive into /dev/hdb6 in Reiserfs (most of it, mounted as "/") and /dev/hdb9 (75Mb mounted as "/boot") in Ext-3. I used fstab in the Gentoo live disk to make hdb9 bootable. hdb7 is Swap, and as it is dynamic in content, the distros can share it. My other idea was that /dev/hdb5 which is /home in Mandrake could also be /home in Gentoo, so I would not set up a non-root user until everything else was working, then mount /home before adding a user, thus making /home files available from either distro.

Other than that, I followed the instructions for the simplest installation (Stage 3), skipping only setting up LILO. I had the idea that I would reboot into Mandrake and add the Gentoo distro to lilo.conf and then I could continue adding bits to Gentoo.

However, after adding the lines to /etc/lilo.conf, when I run lilo, I get an error message that the file specified in my Gentoo entry cannot be found. Of course it can't because it is in a different file tree!

It's not a disaster, as I can use the Gentoo Live CD to access my gentoo partitions and do what I have to do to put it right.

However, my question is: how do I add another linux OS to my current LILO menu (without losing those I have) if the target image/initrd are not visible to lilo at the time I run it?

Any help or even direction to a page would be useful. And yes, I have read the fabulous manual!

DAVE

Make Mandrake & Gentoo share the /boot, so they will have files in the same place. Or mount the Gentoo partition, find out where its kernel & initrd are, and specify them in /etc/lilo.conf . The entries would look something like this:

aaa, thanks, but...

I have Mandrake running in a large reiserfs partition, except for /home, so the code you showed would not be ideal.

Is your other solution that I should mount /dev/hdb9 under mandrake, possibly as /gentoo then instead of "image=/boot/kernel-gentoo-xxx" I would use "image=/gentoo/kernel-gentoo-xxx" in lilo?

If that works, once the kernel starts, would the other bits in the lilo entry then set up the correct root filesystem for gentoo?

Would all this be easier in grub?

DAVE

That will work. Also make sure you get the right initrd (if gentoo uses one). Make sure the 'root=/dev/hdb6' is the right partition.

Thanks. It worked. I actually mounted the gentoo root partition via /gentoo from Mandrake and the boot partition via /gentoo/boot

All I had to do was to add /gentoo before the addresses for the gentoo linux kernel and the initrd image.

That's the (relatively) easy bit.

I've got a feeling that my dalliance with Gentoo isn't going to last very long. For a start, Gentoo has loaded an nvidia driver whose existence was denied by X, but I did manage to locate the file I had downloaded for Mandrake so I loaded that up. I did not have a clue what to do with XF86Config so I just borrowed bits from the way that Mandrake set up XF86Config-4, and I did manage to get X started. I've loaded KDE but KDM isn't there, and I get XDM with no alternatives so all I ever get in X is a blank screen and an "X" mouse pointer, which restarts automatically every time I type killall X as root from a console. This is really annoying...

It seems the instructions to install Gentoo run out just as you need them...

DAVE