VVDQ : Alpine on Ubuntu??

[Derek Broughton]

Beartooth wrote:

> On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:17:00 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> Beartooth Testbedder wrote:
> [...]
>>> What I installed was 6.06 LTS *alternate* (because CentOS was hogging
>>> the whole hard drive, and I didn't want to blow it away, but end up
>>> with a triple boot. I couldn't make regular 6.06 do that -- much to my
>>> surprise.)
>> 
>> That's normal.  The LiveCDs will install to an available partition, but
>> if you want to do anything more complicated you use the alternate CD,
>> but there have been 3 releases since that one.
> 
> Very very strange. I was on an Ubuntu site (naturally, to
> download Ubuntu) and thought I was getting the most recent LTS.

LTS - LONG term support.  That means it's OLD.  

> (Remember, one large part of my purpose is to find something my wife
> won't have to do much to keep up, when I'm beyond doing it -- and do it
> now, before there's any hurry about it.)

phht.  I have the same problem - she gets upgrades when I get around to it. 
There's no point to installing old software - it isn't more stable than
Feisty, and barely more stable than Gutsy, it's just supported.

>>>> My preferences would be in that order - the first is initially time
>>>> consuming, but guaranteed to work, either of other options might not
>>>> work anyway (if it can't resolve the dependencies from the dapper
>>>> release).
>>> 
>>> My guess is there must be some way to get into that repo list, dump the
>>> extraneous ones I shouldn't've added, and enable the universal.
>> 
>> I showed you how to do that in Synaptic...
> 
> You did; I tried it; Synaptic crashed. Thought I posted that;

Ah, of course.  But synaptic didn't crash until _after_ you added all those
mirrors.

> Overall question: I expect my guru to confirm, any time now, that
> I've already hosed my CentOS install altogether. If so, it sounds like I
> might as well go ahead and re-install both -- and a third besides. (Maybe
> a new (I think) specialty called LinguaFluxOS; 

I believe that's Tony Baldwin's - he's around here a lot.

> more likely Fedora -- 
> which generally does pretty well about tolerating pre-existent installs.)

So does Ubuntu.  Anybody can hose a partition when they're installing an
OS :-)  However, I doubt that's really happened.  You've probably just not
got a way to boot to it.
 
> Any hints on getting the second one to recognize the first, and
> the third to recognize both others?

Ubuntu's  installer usually recognizes other Debian-type systems and
Windows, but I don't know about Fedora/CentOS.

If the various distros install their boot loaders to the superblock of their
respective partitions, then the grub in the MBR can just chainload to all
of them (ie - the /boot/menu/grub.lst file will use exactly the same format
to get to Linux partitions as it does to get to Windows).  Odds are at
least fair to middling that at least _one_ distro isn't going to get found
automatically, no matter what order you install them...
> 

-- 
derek