Workstation loaded, time to configure

I got my workstation loaded to dual boot. It's a piece of cake to get it dual booting. I found that Mepis, Vector and Slackware automatically set up the dual boot for you.

I received the 2 drives on Friday. I installed them into the computer as primary master and primary slave. Booted up with a DOS disk and Fdisked. Set up a 3 gig partition to load Windows 98 and left everything else unpartitioned. That's a limitation to DOS fdisk, it doesn't allow you to create non-DOS partitions. I did a quick google to see if there were any replacements for fdisk that would allow you to create a DOS and a Linux partition and can't find any.

I loaded up Windows 98 and was up and running in about 2 hours. That's one thing I've gotten good at, reloading the OS. Next it's time to install linux. I was planning on loading Mepis and the CD has a how-to on installing. Problem is it talks about a file called mkbootfloppy.exe and my CD didn't have that. I did a little googling and other people have the same problem. So I was going to forget about that and try Ubuntu. I found the install readme and it talks about something called SBM.bin. Found this file on the CD and it's awesome.

This file, SBM.bin, is a floppy image. I burned it to disk with rawrite and booted up. This thing is great. Allows me to boot off of CD. I could also use any other OS loaded on the drives. It sees all the partitions and lets you select them. I found SBM on this page.

I booted off the floppy, selected to boot the Mepis CD and it came up as usual. I brought up cfdisk while in Mepis and partitioned the rest of the drives. I've now got /dev/hda1=3 gig, /dev/hda2=4.5 gig, /dev/hda3=500 meg, /dev/hdb1=4 gig, /dev/hdb2=4 gig. Of course hda3 is the swap partition. I will load up linux distros on the other partitions.

While in Mepis, I told it I wanted to install. Stepped thru the installation. First problem was that the install application would not let me put it on the second drive and put the swap on the first drive. So I killed the install and restarted it. I put Mepis on the first drive. I booted up just fine. It was a bit slow, though, so I decided to whack that and try something else.

I decided to try Vector. I followed the hard drive installation directions located on the Vector linux installation guide. To do this, you also have to use loadlin.exe. You can get that here. So you boot into DOS and go to this directory. Use the loadlin command and it starts up. I ran cfdisk to make sure Mepis was no longer there, then did a setup. Installed to the second drive without a hitch. Let me use the swap on the first drive. Rebooted and came up fine. Then I wanted to change the lilo.conf file to indicate this was Vector and it wouldn't write because they were on different drives. Oh well, it doesn't have to say Vector.

I wanted to put on another distro for that other partition. After much thinking I finally decided to load up Slackware. I booted SBM and then the Slackware CD. Loaded up like a charm. I was able to use that last partition as my /home directory and I wrote out lilo to the MBR. After rebooting, I changed lilo.conf to indicate Slackware. I'm good to go, but I haven't used X yet in Slackware. Next is to configure the system, that's going to be a challenge. I'll try to document that extensively.

I think that since Vector is Slackware based, I'm going to remove Vector. First I'm going to edit lilo.conf and set it up to boot 3 different OSes. But I will remove Vector in favor of some non-Slack based distro. I think I'll try something Debian based, but not sure.