Tip: Dual-Booting Linux
By Abhijit Belapurkar2004-09-21
How to Build a Dual-Booting Linux System on a Single Hard Drive
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Having multiple Linux installations to work with allows you to easily test different libraries with the same program, watch how your program interacts with others, or just tweak a parameter here or there to see what happens. This comes in handy for development and testing -- as well as for customer support. You say that you don't have oodles of boxes to work with? No worries -- installing multiple instances of Linux on a single box is a cinch, as you'll soon discover in this tip from IBM interns Chuks Onwuneme and Farhan Khawaja.
As co-ops with IBM Developer Relations, our duties involve helping out the technical support staff to answer customer questions (in other words, we help the Help Desk). We work primarily with IBM WebSphere products -- and one situation we have encountered often is the need to tweak machines to re-create actual customer problems.
Re-creating each problem literally means having the exact same system as the customer, and it is of course much more efficient to do this by partitioning and running multiple systems on each drive, than to have a separate box for each system. And so, some many months ago, we converted from the one-box-per-system method to multiple systems on each box.
Now we can (for instance) run two different versions of IBM WebSphere Application Server on the same OS. All that is needed is to partition a large drive (ours are generally 19G in the lab) into two halves, install the operating system on each partition, then install a version of Websphere Application Server on each partition. Thus, we have have multiple copies of similar environments running on one machine.
We work with various operating systems in the IBM lab, including several Microsoft Windows and NT flavors (Windows 2000 Server and Professional versions, NT Server and NT Professional), as well as AIX and Linux (Red Hat 6.2).
The Microsoft systems include a utility for multiple OS installations, and the conversions were accomplished with little difficulty. However, as we were new to Linux, the Red Hat systems gave us some trouble, especially as we had difficulty finding easy, clear documentation to guide us. This tip, then, is offered in the hopes that others who may be new to Linux and who are facing the same challenge will find it easily, and will find it to be clear, concise and easy to use. Please do let us know if we succeeded (you'll find our email addresses at the top and the bottom of this article).
Our tip covers the installation of multiple instances of the same Linux distribution on a single drive (we use Red Hat in the lab). But with a few tweaks (or with help from some of the documents listed in the Resources section) you should have no problems creating a machine which dual-boots different Linuxes, or combinations of Linux and non-Linux operating systems.
In this tip, we used an older version of Red Hat because we were trying to build exactly the same system as the customer. Hence, the Red Hat version used here is a few years old, and uses the older 2.2 kernel. Newer Linux kernels handle multi-booting differently. It is advisable to upgrade to the newer version of the Linux 2.4(.x) kernel in any case, if you can, for security reasons. Moreover, most Linux installations today now offer GRUB instead of or in addition to LILO. This feature offers more advanced ways to handle the Linux multi-booting facility. Thus, the following tip might not be exactly useful if you are using a newer version that does not use LILO -- but it should be indespensible if you are!
Tutorial Pages:
» How to Build a Dual-Booting Linux System on a Single Hard Drive
» Red Hat Dual Boot: Installation Instructions
» Installation Mark Two
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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