FC2 - FC4 dual boot?

[Jim Cornette]

Marko Vojinovic wrote:

>  Just downloaded FC4, and am willing to try it. However, because I see
>  there are a lot of issues with virtual consoles, nvidia, vmware
>  etc., that are important to me, I am not willing to give up my stable
>  (and heavilly tweaked) FC2 system.
>
>  The setup: I have four partitions: /, /secondroot, /home and swap.
>  /secondroot is empty (I once planned to use it to build LFS, but
>  never had the time to do it...), and I would like to do a clean FC4
>  install on it (so for FC4 that would be /, and FC2 / would be mounted
>  somewhere inside or not at all).
>
>  The questions: 1) I want /home to be used with both FC2 and FC4. I
>  know nothing about selinux, but have read (on this list) that it does
>  some "autorelabeling" or whatever. Is selinux going to make any
>  physical change to the filesystem (ext3) on /home that would render
>  it unusable under FC2 afterwards? (this is very important, because
>  /home is 63 GB full, and I am not willing to lose all that data).

Between FC2 and FC4 there are changes that could impact the config files 
for different applications using two different versions using the same home.
I would think  more as to keeping the versions seperate.
>
>  2) How to setup GRUB? Currently it is in the MBR on /dev/hda, with
>  two stable kernels. Should I let FC4 installation to modify that or
>  should I choose "do not install GRUB" and modify it manually after
>  installation?

There is a selection called advanced bootloader options during the 
installation process. If you select from the pulldown menu to install 
the bootloader in partitions or /mbr locations of drives, grub should 
install in this partition. I use the /boot partition for all but the 
controlling installation in their respective partitions. I have a 
development, FC3 and an FC4 booting this way off of two disks and they 
work .

Say that you select the advanced boot loader options and install the FC4 
grub onto /dev/hdb1 which is the /boot partition for your new FC4 
installation. When you reboot your computer, it will boot back into the 
FC2 grub instance on /mbr. You would need to add an entry to chainload 
FC4 in much the same way as a windows entry would be. 

>
>  3) What is the name of the rpm package containing kernel-devel and
>  does it have any dependencies that are not on the 4 distribution cds?

Kernel-devel matches the version of the kernels you have installed, if 
you remove a particular kernel later, kernel-devel does not get removed.
I believe the only dep is to have a matching kernel for the devel package

>  I don't have an Internet connection to use yum, need to download rpms
>  on a windows machine, burn them to a cd, and then bring them home...
>  (that is the reason I have never installed xine, could not satisfy
>  all dependencies manually). From what I read on the list,
>  kernel-devel is needed by nvidia drivers.

Kernel-devel is needed for modules that you would want to compile, like 
vmware, nvidia and other items that need modules for the running kernel 
to be compiled.

>
>  4) Is there any other issue I should be aware of regarding FC2-FC4
>  interaction? It is vital that FC4 does not harm FC2 in any way.

There is no sure thing for no interactions between the installations. 
The most important aspect is to keep things seperate for the two 
installations. You can mount partitions from each installation via mount 
and mountpoints from one installation to the other. I would not mount 
fc4 partitions during boot through FC2. I had no problems getting at the 
partitions later.


>  Later on, if I find FC4 stable enough, I will migrate to it and
>  delete FC2 eventually.
>
>  Any suggestions?
>

Be careful and do some more investigating of other options (backing up 
data, etc).
Make sure you configure things for each installation to meet your needs.
Check the archives for dual-booting schemes that others have tried.

Jim
>
>  Best regards, :-)) Marko

-- 
Prototype designs always work.
        -- Don Vonada