On Nov 26, 2013, at 3:00 PM, Javier Perez <pepebuho@gmail.com> wrote:

In theory, Ubuntu and Fedora will have their own partitions inside the SDD.
My question is, can I share the /boot partition between Fedora and Ubuntu? both are using Grub2.

Possibly because Ubuntu calls GRUB2 grub, while Fedora calls it grub2 - at least for now, this may change at or after F21.

Since /boot/grub is for Ubuntu and /boot/grub2 is for Fedora, their respective grub.cfg's are separate. The other thing is that the grub packages will also be separately updated, but this tends to not affect grub as installed unless you rerun grub-install (or grub2-install on Fedora).

A possible gotcha is that Ubuntu's grub2 tends to be an older version than Fedora. And only one grub boot.img (previously called stage1) and core.img (previously called stage2) can be installed to a drive at one time. So you'll have to pick which distribution's grub is to be installed *to the disk*. It's ridiculously confusing, but there are two meanings of "installing grub": distribution package installation vs grub-install which installs the bootloader to the disk. Boot.img goes in the MBR, and core.img goes in the MBR gap. *sigh*

Anyway, I think you can get away with it because things are rather differently named. However, I'd make /boot bigger than the default of 500MB.

Let me backup a step. The hardware is UEFI or BIOS based?


Right now I have two /boot partitions (one on each HDD) and it is a pain. For some reason, Ubuntu does not find out Fedora unless I mount the disk each time I update ubuntu kernel. If I update Fedora kernel I have to go to Ubuntu to redo the boot config files. (Yes, the master boot goes to Ubuntu for some reason  I do not remember any more). I want to keep just one /boot partition of maybe 800 MB to make everyone feel confy.

Yeah well you're learning, as have I, that linux distros aren't very friendly to each other, and multiboot is a hostile experience due to the lack of any meaningful cooperation among the distributions to do a better job. Hence the bootloader spec proposal to try and bring some sanity to the process. The spec has some outstanding problems, any of which are resolvable by distro stakeholders sitting down and having a conversation, but that hasn't happened so far.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/


Also, although it is off topic, is there any good tutorial to virtualize the Win2K partition as is? 

You might want to shrink the NTFS volume, and then the partition. Next you can dd it to a file, and then in virt-manager or virsh, you specify the file as Raw. I haven't tried using rsync -a or cp -a to copy it into a qcow2 file instead, but that'd be nice. For one, qcow2 is sparse, so it'll be a smaller size file. Once you've tested it works, you can snapshot it, and only use the snapshots going forward, in case you break something you can just toss the snapshot and make a new one. Also, since the large backing file doesn't change, it gets backed up once, rather than the whole file being backed up every time it gets touched by booting Windows.

One negative is that Win 2K is old, and I don't think its virtio drivers are current for the latest versions of qemu/kvm anymore, so you may have to suffer with something of a performance hit presenting that backing file as an IDE drive.


Chris Murphy