On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 17:56:32 +0000, Rich Grise wrote:
> But, I thought, isn't having them on different partitions enough?

Of course. But you don't understand how LILO works. LILO creates a map
for the BIOS to follow to load the kernel. It can only access mounted
filesystems, and only using the paths and filenames in lilo.conf. Since
each "image" points to the same file ...

> image = /boot/vmlinuz
> image = /boot/vmlinuz
> image = /boot/vmlinuz

.... you get the same kernel mapped.

If you want to boot multiple Linuces on one machine, you really should
set aside a small partition to mount as /boot in each one. Keep your
lilo.conf in there and make /etc/lilo.conf in each install a symlink to
/boot/lilo.conf.

I was just posting about this in the past day or 2, and I've written
this before as well. Yes, as Richard points out, if you're unconcerned
about cruelty to animals there are many ways to skin this cat. Pity the
poor skinless felines.

But my way is much easier to manage. By keeping your kernels and
lilo.conf in a shared place, you can manage your boot loader no matter
which one is booted.

Another excellent boot loader, which can be configured in ANY OS, is
some variant of DOS (FreeDOS should work) and loadlin.exe. On my old
386 (which is now in its 3rd retirement) I used a 10MB FAT12 partition
for this. My /boot was actually UMSDOS.

I don't know much about FreeDOS, but MS-DOS 6.x[1] has a very nice boot
menu feature. I used to have a sample config.sys when I was on the old
slackware.com forums; if you do a search at them (now located at
userlocal.{com,net,org}) you can probably find it.



[1] The same feature was continued through Win98SE. Actually it can be
used in WinME too, if you are a masochist. You have to patch the
io.sys to disable MS's lame attempt to make people think ME != DOS,
but there are (were?) simple instructions on the Web how to do it.
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