[plug] Installing Debian

[Simon Scott (SSC)]

This touches on an interesting topic that maybe you should keep in mind.

When you have 2 or more different distros installed on one machine, you dont
need a distinct set of partitions for each.

For example, as you have found out you *need* to share a /boot partition
otherwise lilo coughs up.

You can also share swap partitions I believe, and obviously you would want
to share /home

Beyond that things would start to get hairy as the differences beween
distros would probably bite you on the ass with /usr, /var etc.

/etc would be a definite no no.

Just out of interests sake, obviously I would need read/write access to
/home and /var, but would it work if I mounted all the other partitions as
read only? Im thinking it would be a good idea to leave everything possible
read only unless installing new software, at which point you could remount
read/write.

This is also interesting from the perspective of running a thin-ish client
with the major partitions mounted via NFS. You would only really need /boot
and /var on the client I believe? Might be cool to try.

Anyone played with this sort of thing?

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Kemner [mailto:zombie at wasp.net.au]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 11:41 AM
To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
Subject: Re: [plug] Installing Debian


Hi Ari

On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Ari Finander wrote:

> 1- If you install the OS to boot from a floppy and not the HDD (I
> didn't want LILO to mess up my previous RH lilo which is working well
> for RH and Windows) how can one go about changing things so it will
> boot from the HDD (assuming RH LILO is configured correctly)?

Copy the kernel (most likely called "linux") to your RedHat /boot
partition and add a stanza like you did for Mandrake.

> _X11TransSocketUNIXConnect: Can't connect: errno = 111
> Unable to communicate with X server!

That is a generic error saying "It didn't work" - you need to provide the
real error message, which should be contained in the lines above these
ones.
 
What are you using to configure X?
XF86Setup is the easiest to use, but may not work with all chipsets.
"apt-get install xf86setup" if you want to try it.

Otherwise, try "xf86config" which is the old text-based way to configure X

 - Matt

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