Notes on building my multiboot Linux (/FreeBSD) PC in 2007 and comments on the distros passing through it since then. Their main purpose is to simplify the task of rebuilding the setup should a disk fail, but they also provide an account of the highly variable quality of modern distros.

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What is wanted:

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Items needed before starting:

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Hardware used:

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Building the initial setup

  1. Delete all partitions from the last to the first with Ranish, or...
  2. Zap the whole HDD with Ranish or Tom's Root Boot and build the partitions again.
  3. Start with Red Hat 9.
    • Use the CD images on the old IBM drive via the RH installation boot floppy. Cool! No other distro can manage this. Uses loopback mount and recognises the image files without names being specified. Input...
      • media: hard drive
      • partition: hdd12
      • directory: RH9
    • Generic wheel mouse PS/2
    • New installation (ignore the version on hdd2)
    • Use Disk Druid. Want /, /boot and swap, plus any common ones. Must go to "Set Properties" for each partition and specify "format" before can enter mounting directory. /boot is going to hold the effective GRUB menu for the whole system; RH grumbles if less than 75MB in it!
    • Clock "Pacific Auckland" and HW set to UTC.
    • Select whatever packages wanted. Easy to get up to about 2200 MB.
    • Graphics "ATI Radeon Generic" with 128 MB seems to work OK.
    • Take floppy out before reboot to second part of installation.
    • Once RH is up, remove the hdd swap partition from /etc/fstab and disconnect the /dev/hdd drive.
  4. Replace RH's grub, which is their own version of version 0.93 and doesn't handle definitions of BSD partitions like (hd0,2,a). Taking the source tarball and compiling it works fine. Then add in the grub.conf entries for all other distros if possible, to save reboots into RH during their installation procedures.
  5. Use Ranish to hide RH's "/" and "/boot" partitions by setting their type to X'FF'.
  6. Next do Ubuntu 6.10 AMD64 from the Dick Smith DVD.
    • FIRST FIX A STUPID BUG IN THE SETUP! As soon as the "live DVD" desktop appears, pop up a terminal window and do the following: 
          cd /usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity
    sudo /usr/bin/vim.tiny validation.py

    ...and near end, change
    if not root:
        result.add(MOUNTPOINT_NOROOT)
    to (keep spaces!)
    if not root:
        pass
    • This distro assumes the H/W clock is UTC. Don't click on the world map, as it sometimes freezes the system. Select Pacific Auckland in the menu instead.
    • "US English" keyboard, NOT "US International"!
    • Ignore (bad) suggestion and manually edit the partition table. As the partitions have been done by Ranish, nothing to do in "Prepare Partitions". Click "next".
    • Define Ubuntu's own partition(s) and any common ones. Specify format on own and swap, but NOT on other common ones, else access via LABEL= or UUID in fstab will fail for other distros! Use dropdown menus to blank out any residual suggested lines. GREAT CARE HERE!
    • Didn't see how to change "/" to ext2 from the default ext3. ext3 is fine.
    • Don't miss changing GRUB (hd0) to (fd0) in the screen before rebooting.
    • ANOTHER BUG on exit from installation. Ubuntu splash screen freezes. Seems to be harmless. This is a known bug on the 64-bit version (hardOCP).
  7. Put the Ranish floppy in and force reboot. Restore the hidden partitions.
  8. Reboot into Red Hat and update grub.conf to be able to access Ubuntu if not already done.
  9. Next do FreeBSD 5.3 from CD. No need to hide any partitions first.
    • Use Ranish to set the type of the slice to "00", else FreeBSD thinks it is already in use!
    • BUGGY INSTALLATION! If you have to backtrack or correct anything already entered, safest just to abort the process, use Ranish to zero the slice and start again.
    • Start with the default option 1.
    • Do a "standard" installation.
    • It proposes the "00" slice. Type "C" to use it. Shows the number of 512-byte blocks (16065 times number of cylinders). "Q" means go ahead, not discard input!
    • Boot Manager should be "None".
    • With a 500-cylinder slice and 1GB of RAM, the swap partition size of almost 2GB is too big. It asks for partition sizes in blocks, so delete the offered partitions and enter them from scratch and reinput as follows (calculator handy to work out multiples of 16065):
      • / 514080 blocks (32 cyls)
      • swap 2104515 (131)
      • /var 514080 (32)
      • /tmp 257040 (16)
      • /usr remainder, offered as default... 4642785 (289)
      Note that Newfs="Y" means "format it".
    • Install ports collection? - Y
    • Skip Ethernet device configuration. Then more stuff:
      • Gateway? - N
      • inetd? - N
      • SSH login? - Y
      • Anonymous FTP access - N
      • NFS server? - Y and get a forced edit of a configuration file. To get out, command ... exit
      • client? - Y
      • Custom console settings? - N
    • Time zone input for NZST works fine.
    • Linux binary compatibility? - Select this.
    • Mouse - PS/2 style "auto" protocol
    • Finally install a randomish selection of packages. Huge list, most of which is probably not useful. Never seems to ask for any of the extra CDs.
    • Can always invoke the installation routines from the running system via /usr/sbin/sysinstall.
    • The CD/DVD drive is /dev/acd0.
  10. Do SuSE 10.2 AMD64 version off Neil's DVD.
    • The first splash screen offers "boot from HD" as an option... presumably this is helpful if you forget to take out the DVD at the installation reboot point?
    • Defaults to 1280 x 1024.
    • Choose "New installation" at "Select install mode"
    • The clock setup is fine.
    • Select KDE, not GNOME.
    • Go straight to the "expert" tab on the setup menu.
    • Don't forget to set the KBD to "US English"!
    • Let SuSE's "/" partition be ext3.
    • Go to "Custom Partition Setup" and go straight on to "Custom Partitioning (for experts)". Doesn't hurt to click "show details". Display of partitions in settings is very clear. N.B. If you don't see a mount point against it, the partition is going to be left out of fstab. MAKE SURE that the "F" flag does not appear against common partitions like /tmp and /user! CAN HANDLE A MAXIMUM OF 15 PARTITIONS!
    • Packages... add things like file server, basis development, Opera, Acroread, XML and LaTex editing tools. The indicated size is much too low. Even after dependencies are added in later, still too low.
    • Bootloader... ignore "Section Management". This is a means of adding to a pre-existing grub.conf from another multiboot O.S. It seems to find Ubuntu but not Red Hat. All a bit confusing. If no own version of grub.conf already with SuSE lines in, NOTE WHAT SuSE WOULD HAVE ADDED, before clicking "No bootloader". There doesn't seem to be a floppy option any more.
    • Gives a good clear warning before it starts to format the new partitions.
    • Package installation off DVD takes of the order of half an hour.
    • Auto reboot straight back into the rest of the installation if the grub.conf table has previously been updated.
    • N/W configuration: leave firewall in, but set ssh to allowed. Name server can be 192.168.0.1.
    • User authentication LOCAL.
    • Define user "ed" WITHOUT (default) auto logon!
    • Shows release notes. Note the real effort to accommodate multiboot systems.
    • H/W config: Sees 
              ATI Radeon X300 (RV370) 5B60 (PCIE)
        with monitor
        VESA 1280 x 1024 @ 60Hz, 24-bit, 17 inch.
        3D acceleration disabled.

        Sound card K8N4-E mainboard, configured
        as snd-card-0.
    • END. Click clone system to create a file in /root/autoinst.xml
    • Long wait (ca. 35 seconds) before first KDE screen after login.

Failed Distros:

Later Installations:

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KUBUNTU 7.10

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UBUNTU 8.10 over UBUNTU 6.10 01 Nov 2008

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KUBUNTU 8.10 over UBUNTU 8.10 03 Nov 2008

New 750GB Samsung SATA HDD May 2009

This replaced the existing drive, after which the whole procedure was repeated OK, with differences:

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KUBUNTU 9.04 on 14 May 09

Wiped 30 Mar 2011.

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OpenSUSE 11.1 on 09 Jun 09

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KUBUNTU 9.10 on 04 Nov 2009

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OpenSUSE 11.2 from 64-bit KDE LIVE CD 07 Dec 09

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Ubuntu 10.04 from downloaded and burned live DVD 14 May 10

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Mandriva 2010 Spring Free 15 Nov 10

Now begins the "summary" stage, where a lot of the important stuff happens.

While integrating this distro into the disk environment, noticed that user numbers start from 500, not 1000, so access problems to existing files. Created a second user numbered 1001 and NOT having his own group (the default), but "users" as elsewhere. Used this to delete "ed" and redefine it with the required number (1000). However, the promise to delete /home/ed was not honoured, so a permissions mess resulted. Deleted "ed" once more and removed all the files by hand, then defined it. Worked.

Bugs:

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OpenSUSE 11.4 from 32-bit KDE LIVE CD 30 Mar 11

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OpenSUSE 11.4 from 32-bit GNOME LIVE CD 07 Apr 11

This distro has display issues... there are missing horizontal and vertical lines in displayed browser pages, and also with at least some other apps. Not worth trying further.

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Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit from downloaded and burned live DVD 10 May 11

Use partition sda17 after zeroing Kubuntu 9.10.

When this stage has been done, the "Install Now" button has to be clicked. BAD! No final presentation of actions for review before taking the jump. In any case, the identity and keyboard specifications haven't been done yet. Copying to the new partition is in progress as these steps are being done.

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OpenSUSE 11.4 from 64-bit KDE LIVE CD 26 May 11

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Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit from downloaded and burned live DVD 09 May 12

Use partition sda11 after zeroing Kubuntu 7.10.

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OpenSUSE 12.2 from 64-bit KDE LIVE CD 17 Oct 12

Use partition sda9 after zeroing Ubuntu 1004.

Wiped 06 Jun 2014.

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OpenSUSE 12.3 from 64-bit KDE LIVE DVD 04 Apr 13

Even these stripped down "live" versions now no longer fit on a CD.

Use partition sda13 after zeroing OpenSUSE 11.4.

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New 120GB SanDisk SSD added May 2013

OpenSUSE 13.1 from 64-bit KDE LIVE DVD 05 Dec 13

Use partition sdb2 on the SanDisk SSD.

Something has been damaged since 12.3... this release freezes sporadically. The numerous updates and fixes downloaded have made no difference.

Wiped 28 Dec 2014. Never much used, as no compelling advantage over 12.3.

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Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit from downloaded and burned live DVD 09 May 14

Use partition sdb3 on the SanDisk SSD.

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Mint 17 Cinnamon 64-bit from downloaded and burned live DVD 09 Jun 14

Use partition sda9 on the regular HDD.

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OpenSUSE 13.2 from 64-bit FULL DVD 28 Dec 14

Use partition sdb2 on the SanDisk SSD.

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Mint 17.3 Cinnamon 64-bit from downloaded and burned live DVD 15 Feb 16

The main reason for installing this version was to get newer versions of LibreOffice and Firefox. On the older Mint, the latter was beginning to have problems displaying the newest versions of major websites, and its version of Adobe Flash had been deprecated.

Use partition sda16 on the regular HDD, overwriting the Mandriva 2010 Spring distro, which had sat there, essentially unused, for five years.

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Transition to new multiboot machine 2016

The multiboot rig had been in service for some ten years; indeed, the case was even older, having been bought at the end of 2001 to house a single-boot OpenSuse system. The loud fans had been a source of irritation for all those years. The replacement was going to be one thing above all else - quiet.

The collection of the components took a couple of weeks over the holidays before the new machine was assembled and ran for the first time in January 2016. A monster passive cooler the size of a medium saucepan (and costing £100) guaranteed the longed-for peace. I used a spare forty-inch TV as a monitor at first, workable, but giving horrible colours; it was quickly replaced by a 4K Dell monitor, and the difference was enormous. With a fanless power supply and only a high-end SSD for storage, I now had a machine with no moving parts, thus totally silent rather than merely quiet. Heaven!

Over the course of 2016, the user space of the old machine was slowly transferred to the new one and gradually checked out with the newer versions of all the major applications. As confidence grew, the old machine was started less and less often, until in March 2017 it was safe to wipe the hard drive. It lived on under a desk until October that year, when it was finally taken to the Refuse Disposal Centre.

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What is wanted:

A multiboot system like the first one, but with fewer distro partitions and no attempt to cater for a BSD (...life is too short). Four partitions for two recent Mints and two others in case Mint is wanting should be enough. The /backup partition can also be dispensed with, as it was not being used for any meaningful backup functions.

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New System Hardware:

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New Hardware Issues:

Since the new motherboard has no floppy drive connector, meddling with the boot process with a Grub floppy is history. So also is the laying out of the initial partitioning with a Ranish floppy, but parted off a bootable Linux USB drive is perfectly OK instead.

The mouse and keyboard connect via a USB dongle, and buying them was an act of faith in that they are unlikely to have been tested much beyond Windows. In the event, they barely work with Grub 2.0, freezing at the slightest provocation. To boot anything except the default distro, it is necessary to proceed exactly as follows:

Every now and then I come back to the system to see an endless sequence of "5"s appearing in the terminal window, as if that key on the keyboard is being held down. Pressing anything on the keyboard halts it. The problem is extremely sporadic, disappearing for long periods at a time. It has only been observed on Mint 17.3, but that could be because the others are little used yet.

Also every now and then, the cursor goes missing on the desktop although the mouse is still working. It can be recovered by locking and unlocking the screen or, if that fails, by switching user (...to oneself is enough). Of course, you have to grope around with the pointerless mouse until the relevant icon lights up.

Distros Installed:

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Mint 17.3 Cinnamon from downloaded and burned live DVD 22 Mar 16

OpenSUSE 42.1 from 64-bit FULL DVD 06 Apr 16

Mint 18.3 Cinnamon from downloaded and burned live DVD 13 Feb 18

The above three went into partitions nvme0n1p2, nvme0n1p5 and nvme0n1p6 respectively. Most importantly, none of the installation routines had any problem with the new NVME (Non-Volatile Memory Express) "drive", really just a tiny circuit board, nor with its tediously long partition names. The installations were not sufficiently different from those of their predecessors on the old machine to be worth commenting on in detail. The latter two were a bit disappointing; in particular, the newer Mint had changed the way of adjusting sizes of things like the system panel and the desktop icons to the extent that I couldn't make a pleasing desktop on my 4k Monitor.

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MX Linux 18.2 from 64-bit LIVE DVD 29 Apr 19

Since the building of the new multiboot machine, the first distro installed on it had remained the default one, but by early 2019, Mint 17.3 was showing its age. It was a distro where bugs seemed to come and go with the updates; the problems with mad 5 disease and invisible mouse pointers had quietly gone away in recent times, but now looking through more than a few twenty-megapixel camera images with Nemo and the Gnome Image viewer led to a frozen desktop and a forced reboot. Worse, some two and a half years of flawless desktop display on my 4K monitor via the onboard graphics alone had come to an end and some sort of speed issue was making the lower right-hand parts of windows or indeed the whole desktop refresh too slowly when updated, a constant minor irritation. Even more recently, the desktop was failing to appear about a third of the time after the login splash screen; I was having to go first to a virtual text console with CRL-ALT-F2, set a system reboot after a few minutes, return to the splash screen and (when the login worked and the desktop was up), go back to the text console and cancel the reboot. Nevertheless, inertia kept me from moving on until April 2019, when all Mint 17 releases suddenly went to end-of-life status and the need for change became urgent.

Unfortunately, some reviewers of the latest Mint release like this one had been disappointed. It looked like a good time to try a completely different distro; I didn't want to waste time, though, so only something with really good reviews would do. Top of the recent page hit rankings on Distrowatch was MX Linux, and this review of its most recent release was enough to clinch the decision. This distro was the first of its family I had tried, and the attempt to install it as a candidate default distro merits a page of its own.

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Mint 20 Cinnamon from 64-bit LIVE DVD 15 Sep 20

Despite some earlier poorish reviews of Mint versions, I had found the Cinnamon desktop to be a generally pleasant experience. After the initial tribulations of MX 18.2, I had been able to use that distro for a year without too many complaints. There was an irritating problem with the screen locker, however... once it kicked in, you couldn't get back to your desktop. Touching a key on the keyboard or moving the mouse evoked no response. Fortunately, you could still fire up a console with CTRL-ALT_Fn and kill the lightlocker process, then get back into the desktop with CTRL-ALT_F7. But then of course the screen locker was gone for good. The latest reviews were a little better, so it was time to look at Mint again.

Installation from the DVD was straightforward and posed no puzzles. As usual, the only dangerous part, the definition of partitions, was via the "something else" option (long ago called "expert mode") and demanded no more than reasonable care.

Once the system was up and running, however, I quickly noticed that there was no sound. The list of sound output channels ("sinks") didn't look right, so I went back to Mint 17.3, where sound had always been OK, to see what it listed. You could play sound through these interfaces:

And that was the problem, for the third item was missing in Mint 20. Not being a sound freak, I just have a simple set of Logitech speakers and woofer, connected directly to the motherboard by and old-fashioned TRS plug. This setup and the rest of my hardware hadn't changed, so somebody had introduced a bug. There followed the usual search engine Calvary with results which were variously about something else entirely, or about fifteen years old, or by people who hadn't read the question before answering, or by people who had read the question, but gave an answer that was irrelevant or unhelpful. Eventually I came across a tip to modify the configuration of Pulseaudio, the sound server program, to stop the loading of the module-udev-detect module in favour of the module-detect one instead, and sound was back. Yet another situation where a newbie tempted to try out Linux because it is "better than Windows" would be stopped in his tracks and likely give up on it forever.

I was disappointed to find that the Kermit FTP client package was no longer in the repositories. I had used it to update this site since, like, forever. With its "simulate" mode, you could always first check that the files about to be uploaded were the ones you expected, and a single script did everything. It was going to be missed.

The distro ran normally enough. I once left it running for about ninety days with a giant calculation running on one core only. I came back from seven week's holiday to find the desktop ostensibly in good health, but on close inspection with almost every part of it broken. The mouse pointer didn't change on hovering, clicking would bring a covered window to the foreground, copying and pasting in the File Handler didn't do anything... but simply logging the user out and back in again made the problem go away, so I wasn't too concerned. It remained as the default distro for a couple of years.

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Mint 21.1 Cinnamon from 64-bit LIVE DVD 23 Apr 23

More than two years had gone by, and I was feeling like trying a new candidate for default distro. There was no rush… Mint 20 wasn't due to reach end-of-life until 2025. Nevertheless, this review of the latest Mint release wasn't bad. It was the work of a moment (Gigabit broadband yay!) to download the Cinnamon version and whip up a DVD.

The installation proceeded normally until a warning message said that an EFI boot record needed to be defined, as otherwise the installation was likely to fail. This was something new. I decided to ignore it and press ahead. My multiboot setup was very well established and ought to work this time too. However, at the end of the installation, this message appeared:

     Executing grub-install /dev/nvme0n1 failed. This is a fatal error

Hmm. I continued towards the usual reboot, but then the installer came to a sticky end:

    We're sorry, the installer crashed. After you close this window, we'll
    allow you to file a bug report using the integrated bug reporting tool. This
    will gather information about your system and your installation process. The
    details will be sent to our bug tracker and a developer will attend to the
    problem as soon as possible.

Ha ha, they were only joking... no bug reporting tool was presented or even findable. I just booted into Mint 20 and did grub-update. This found the new distro and I could boot into it OK. It seemed to work at first sight, but... no sound again. I groped around sound configuration for a bit without success, and then got cold feet. Maybe the missing EFI startup is causing problems. Better start again.

Zero the root partition and off we go. This time specify an EFI partition at the end of the free space and give it a GB, plenty more than it's ever likely to want. No need to specify a device for bootloader installation now. I am correctly warned that the swap, root and EFI partitions are going to be formatted. But then: 

     Executing grub-install /dev/nvme0n1 failed. This is a fatal error

...and the installer crashes as before. I can look at the nascent EFI partition and see that it has stuff in it, so presumably that part of the installation was successful.

Sigh. Start the installation from scratch again, without spending the time to zero the root partition first. Get to the partition step as usual, but now it warns me that I am changing the size of the root partition, so the operation may take some time. What?? No, I'm not! I didn't specify any new value, and I can see the size it is going to use; it's exactly the same as last time. Another bug.

Zero the root partition and start again. And this time the installation proceeds normally. It doesn't complain about the size of the root partition, grub-install doesn't fail and the installer doesn't crash. I reboot when instructed, and 

     SQUASHfs error: Unable to read <...illegible...>

messages fill the screen at top speed for ever and ever. Interrupting them is impossible. Nothing for it but to force the reboot.

Once the desktop is up, things are back to normal. I can go through my setup checklist with no more trouble, and nothing is obviously wrong or missing. I can't explain any of the above failures, and I don't know what, if anything, the EFI code is doing. The GRUB menu at startup is exactly as it always was. All a bit unsatisfactory, but I have a working distro.

And the sound was back, after I remembered the changes to default.pa needed in Mint 20 above; they are still necessary in Mint 21.1. Not exactly RTFM, more RMYFN, with MY for "my own" and N for "notes".

After a few weeks, no serious problems have shown up, so it can be my new default distro and at least my time hasn't been completely wasted.