There was quite a learning curve, but I've been using OS/2 Warp 3.0's Boot Manager to boot SuSE(5.3), Debian(2.0) and RedHat(5.1). I determined the partition sizes I wanted before hand and initially partitioned using OS/2's fdisk. I'm using a WD 4.3Gb udma with partitions for Boot Manager, OS/2(rather small), root partitions for SuSE, Debian and RedHat(all at 100 Mb), /usr for all three dists(varying in size depending on how much I use the distribution, but generally fairly large), /home(100 Mb) for each dist., /opt for SuSE(large) and 128Mb swap partitions for each dist(I have 64Mb SDRAM). I've not investigated it, but I'm wondering if I could support all three distributions with one swap partition. I should add I wasn't certain how well the LBA setting worked in my bios so I set up for 528 Mb(off hand I don't recall all the other settings) and placed all root partitions below the 1024 barrier. I, also, set lilo in the root partition. I prefer to not fool with the MBR. My OS/2 supports Win31 so I keep it for that, otherwise I would use System Commander, which seems to be spoken of well by many(Partition Magic seems an alternate). I intially tried using a ide(420 Conner) HDD for swap partitions, but though I've not investigated I think the combination won't work, at least not well. The system started paging and eventually locked up totally, so currently that drive supports OS/2 as a data partition. I'm considering a second udma HDD to locate the swap partitions; another alternative is to try scsi since it appears there will be more drivers(or appears so). I prefer multiple partitions on multiple drives for long term reliability. My experience at network administration is very limited, but I replaced two scsi drives on a server in about that many months on a Compaq 500 Pro(we had 4 WD scsi). That is pretty much how my linux box is configured(of course my sound doesn't work yet, but I'm confident it will. The learning curve on installing was steep.) Regards, Bob "Eau de Slick Scent extracted from the roots of Taxus Clintonia, a fast-spreading, soil depleting shrub indigenous to southwestern Arkansas. In human studies the essence, even highly diluted to 0.5%, produces unusual effects. Those inhaling the odor experience lethargy, apathy, and detachment from reality. At full strength, the extract produces its most striking effect: a hypnotic state in which the subject believes even the most obvious falsehoods told to him." - "National Review" Michael Perry wrote:

So I got slack 3.6 installed (wow, what a lot of work - will take suse any old day :). I followed the sage advice of folks here and have found that as someone suggested you pretty much have to copy the /vmlinuz from /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hda2 with another name or when lilo boots it uses the /vmlinuz from /dev/hda2 which creates some interesting problems with slack 3.6. Its more academic now since I am awaiting delivery of redhat 5.2 at this point and I cannot seem to get slack's obtuse setup program to see the atapi cd I have but yet it will mount it fine at shell. As an interesting point, the cdrom works quite well in suse and other stuff I have tossed at it. I think slack's gui setup tool times out too quick. I watched it mounting and my cd light does not even come on; yet when I manually mount it... ta da. Success.

So the 64 buck question is there is no lilo at /dev/hdb2 since I chose to use the lilo at /dev/hda in the mbr. No point in two lilo's as Mr. Johnson points out in his followup post. Now when I decide to compile a kernel at /dev/hdb1 what do I do to get it seen? I have no lilo there to run and the /vmlinuz.slak is copied from /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hda2. If I run the /sbin/lilo on /dev/hda2 it will just see the /vmlinuz.slak I placed there before.

This seems rather unusual for one operating system. Comments, other ways of doing things, gratefully accepted. Using the Os/2 boot manager I booted numerous copies of OS/2 warp at different spots with no issues. Surely there is an elegant way of doing this.

-- Michael E. Perry mperry@basin.com ------------------

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