Want to bring some Gentoo love to Ubuntu

[lduperval]

Hi,

When I switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu some time back, one of the things I missed most was the ability to reboot to a specific partition (Windows, other OS, etc.) I know that once upon a time, Gentoo allowed you do do that. Is it still the case? If so, what is the package that does that? Is it Gentoo-specific or can it be ported to other distros fairly easily?

Thanks,

L

[causality]

From reading your post, I am guessing that what you want is a boot manager. Gentoo typically uses GRUB for this.

GRUB is a typical bootloader for Gentoo Linux, even when you have no other OS installed. Therefore, you almost certainly have this installed so it's just a matter of configuration. If so, you should have a file called /boot/grub/menu.lst. This is a symlink which points to /boot/grub/grub.conf. There will be at least one entry for your current Gentoo root partition; this should definitely be left alone! You can add a second entry for another OS. In that case, rebooting your machine will give you a menu letting you choose which OS to load. You can set one as default so that just hitting <Enter> will load that one, and you can set a timer so that unattended reboots will load the default OS after X seconds of giving you time to choose one.

One decent GRUB guide is found in the Gentoo Handbook. Another is located here.

[lduperval]

HI,

No, I know what GRUB is. Maybe I explained it wrong, and it's been a while since I've used Gentoo. So let me explain better.

In the GNOME environment, there is an applet that allows you to click on it to restart, shutdown, suspend, etc. So the options look like this (or similar):

Switch user...
Suspend
Lock screen
Shut down
Hibernate
Reboot
...

But the version of Gentoo GNOME I used to use had something like this:

Switch user...
Suspend
Lock screen
Shut down
Hibernate
Reboot
Reboot to <Windows>
Reboot to <BeOS>
...

Now, where it says "<Windows>" or "<BeOS>", those are entries in GRUB (or LILO, at the time I think). The idea, of course, was the the reboot was automatic and you didn't have to wait for the GRUB menu to pop up and then choose your boot option.

I'm not sure how that worked though: was the GRUB/LILO config rewritten every time? I don't think so because when I rebooted after using Windows, it would go to Gentoo automatically so the reboot option wasn't permanent.

Maybe it was a LILO feature and doesn't work with GRUB?

I really don't know but I figure if it's still in use, somebody here probably knows.

L

[beandog]

[wthrowe]

I think that was a LILO feature that doesn't exist in grub.

I seem to recall reading a discussion about it somewhere where the best anyone came up with on a grub system was a script to swap grub.conf files at shutdown, but that changes the default permenantly instead of just once, so is less useful for booting into Windows on a box that normally boots Linux. It could probably work to switch between different distros, though.

[pa4wdh]

Hi,

I'm not sure about the GUI part of all this, but i guess it can be done.
Grub comes with the grub-set-default, which allows you to set a default choice for the next boot, this might be the way to do something similar with grub.

More information can be found in the grub info file, with info grub, then check "invoking grub-set-default".

Best regards,
pa4wdh
_________________
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[jcTux]

I remember having used this feature 2 years ago with openSuse+KDE. I don't think that is a Lilo only feature, because it was grub installed.

[lduperval]

Well, I found this:

http://sidvind.com/wiki/GRUB:_Boot_another_OS_once

L