Re: Xy4 - OS options

[Paul Lagasse pglagasse@xxxxxxxx]

On 06/11/2011 10:41 AM, Raphael wrote:
> Slick! Hats off to you, Paul, your version of xytonix.sh is not only
> more elegant, it eliminates the Thunderbird problem completely.
Beats me; didn't think it would make a difference re Tbird. The iconv
part is nice; it allows for the conversion of letters with diacrits,
though I rarely benefit from it as it turns out. In honesty, that and
xsel were things I learned from email or reading online.
> As of a couple weeks ago, I'm on 10.04 on both machines -- I had
> stayed on 9.10 on the netbook out of some forgotten (and probably
> phantom) anxiety about a broken utility, but now I have to admit I'm
> quite content with it. Come to think of it, I think the main reason I
> finally upgraded -- I tend to stay far from the bleeding edge -- was
> problems I was having consistently with Remastersys.
I'm not keen on the bleeding edge either, which is why I tend to have
several distros going at once. It allows me to check out the new without
giving up the tried and true.
> Since I will confess to very mild concerns about the future of Ubuntu
> -- I've seen the disaffection with what some see as Mark
> Shuttleworth's willful behavior, even before the move to Unity -- I
> have a more than passing interest in how you multi-boot the distros.
> It took me a couple of years to realize what I guess you did early on
> -- to keep a separate partition for data, apart from home/[user] -- I
> wonder, if you multiboot two or three distros on the same 'pute, do
> they all share that data partition, which in my case is /usr/local/data?
It just might be a bumpy ride for a while with Mr. Shuttleworth at the
wheel -- but then, he does own the car and doesn't charge to ride.
My desktop computer currently has 7 OSes; Win 7, for when I have to, and
three Ubuntus, two Mints, and a Mint Debian (and a partridge in a pear
tree). I always give my partitions labels using e2label
post-installation -- it makes it easier to figure out what's what. I use
EasyBCD to choose between Win 7 and U. 10.04's Grub2 menu (I adopted
EasyBCD because I needed to see what it was like before I inflicted it
on the computer of a friend that I didn't want to subject to a Grub'd
MBR). Grub gives me a choice of my distros, but I boot the various
distros directly by pointing Grub at each distro's initrd.img and
vmlinuz symlinks in / (and don't allow Grub to scan for other OSes,
which cuts down on clutter in the Grub menu) -- I also have some lines
that use the configfile command, but U 10.04's Grub2 chokes on U 11.04's
configfile because of the changes in Grub2 in the past year. I can give
you more explicit details and examples etc. but that's probably better
offlist -- just let me know, and i'll send them in all their boring glory.
All my distros do share same data partition, /dev/sda6, which during
installation I set to mount as /home/pgl/data. (They also all share the
same vfat partition, mounted as /home/pgl/transfer, for file sharing
with Win 7.) My ~/Desktop is symlinked to in ~/data; nearly all my other
toplevel folders are symlinks to folders in ~/data/backup, so
~/Documents is just a link to ~/data/backup/documents. Xy4's in a folder
on ~/data, ~/.dosemurc is a symlink to a file on ~/data/backup, and
~/.dosemu/drive_c is a symlink to a ~/data/xy4/dosemu_c.drv -- I've done
it often enough that I now have a script file that handles most of the
setup. It's a little Byzantine, but it works. Because I'm always the
first user set up, and always have the same username, I have no username
or ID conflicts; once it's all set up, when data is mounted at boot all
the links to the root partition work fine, all the root partition's
links to data work fine, and there are no permissions issues.

Paul