[plug] RH 7.3 and RH 9

[Craig Ringer]

> 1. Multiple booting
> I have installed RH 9 in a multiple boot system which already had RH 7.3 
> installed. I installed RH 9 as a clean instal in a partition that I 
> found that I had, while retaining the RH7.3 installation, which I am 
> using, and which is useful, for parallel implementation.

If you're dual booting multiple RH versions, you'll want to modify 
/etc/fstab on each to use the '/dev/hdxn' syntax for locating devices, 
in stead of specifying them as 'LABEL=/' like RH like to. This is 
because you'll have multiple volumes labeled '/' and it can confuse things.

> RH( lio.conf file, with the RH7.3 file, and modified it to include RH 9. 
> However, the only way that I can get the computer to properly boot into 
> RH 9, is to use the RH 9 boot disk.

Use GRUB, not lilo, for your boot loader. Under RH9, make sure 
/boot/grub/menu.lst is correct then run
"grub-install /dev/hda" (replace hda with your boot disk device). Then 
make sure the other OSes don't overwrite the MBR (debian likes to do 
this when installing a new kernel, unless told not to).

> Is it possible to have different versions of Linux, in a muliple boot 
> system, using lilo, so that the intervention of booting from a floppy 
> boot disk is not needed?

Well, it is with GRUB and since people have been doing it forever it's 
presumably also possible with LILO. I'm not entirely clear on what the 
problem you're having is, so I can't understand what needs to be done. A 
detailed explanation of exactly what goes wrong when you try to boot one 
OS or the other would be very useful.

> But, in RHN, I am unable to instal packages or update them. The gnorpm 
> utility has gone, and instead, some application named "Application 
> Manager" or something similar has replaced it, but I cannot find how to 
> add or update packages with it.

rpm -Uvh packagename

Do make sure you downloaded the RPM packages of up2date etc, not just 
the certificate file (though if you just downloaded the cert, there 
should be info with it on how to install it).

> It appears to me that RH 9 has become quite black-box-like, like MS 
> Windows, or worse, so that the system is now difficult to administer, to 
> update, or, to add applications.

I'd have to disagree with that. RHN sucks, but severn will have yum 
built in (an apt-like utility) and support for apt repositories as well. 
It took long enough, but they're doing it. Frankly, that's the only 
"black-box" like thing I can see - I'm not a fan of how heavily they 
patch the kernel, qt, etc, but they're up front about what and how 
they're doing that.

> Can anyone who has RH9 running, help with these problems?

Try going http://www.fedora.us/index-main.html, grabbing apt-get from 
them, and using that for your package management. It's quite nice ;-) 
Fedora have since joined up with Red Hat, so most of what they're doing 
now will be provided in the core RH distro in the next version and the 
current betas, but their RH9 stuff is still there.

Craig Ringer


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