Phase 2

This guide describes dual-booting PCLOS on a computer that already has 6.10 installed and has been partitioned beforehand to accept another OS. Partitioning was already described in first part.

Restart PC, drop PCLOS CD in tray, “Welcome to PCLinuxOS”

Sign in as - Username: root, Password: root, move mouse to 'Login', Left-click

When you get to the PCLOS desktop, double-click on 'Install PCLinuxOS'

“This wizard will help you install...” Next

“Normal Hard Drive (ide, sata) Next

Choose 'Custom disk partitioning' Next

“Please make a backup of your data first” OK

You get the Draklive – Install Enhanced partition map. I left-clicked on the second ext3 partition, (hda2) then left-clicked on “mount point”.

New window pops up, with “/” showing in the 'Mount point' line. I clicked “OK” and get this

Notice how the map shows two “Journalised FS: ext3” partitions, denoted in the dark red, and one bright green swap. It's saying the same thing as Gparted once you understand the language. Notice also that we have “/” showing in the second partition, /dev/hda2. That's where we want it to go.

Since the HDD already has a swap partition I don't need to make one. If I wanted to make a separate 'home' partition I'd click on hda2, then click on the “resize” button, then go thru those steps, which seem fairly straightforward. We're keeping this simple so I'm just building one partition for PCLOS.

Click on “Done”

'Choose the partitions you want to format' – hda2 is checked off already so I just click on “Next” even though it's already in the proper format for PCLOS to just go ahead and install.

Big warning sign that you're about to format Click Next

'Please wait Formatting hda2' 'Press Next to Install or Cancel to Quit' Next

'Copying in progress' Long wait, then 'Please wait...Creating mount points and preparing bootloader'

Pay attention.. You want to make 2 changes – change 'Bootloader to use' from LILO to 'GRUB with text' and you want to install the boot device to /dev/hda2. What you're doing is telling PCLOS to use GRUB instead of LILO and install it in the same partition with the rest of the OS Click Next

Now I get a window that says,

“You decided to install the bootloader on a partition. This implies you already have a bootloader on the hard drive you boot (eg: System Commander). On which drive are you booting?” hda is checked, I click Next

Note: It's interesting that PCLOS pops up a warning at this point. What we're doing is not typical and that's why you get a cautionary message. For the average Joe who's installing one Linux distro the bootloader will install at the front of the HDD.

New window that lists four entires in boot menu. I chose to leave this alone. Why? Because I didn't know what the heck it meant.

Click Finish Set administrator (root) password. Type something in twice, or choose no password at all, Next

Enter a user

Real name: Login name: (it auto-entered my first name after I finished the above line) Password: Password (again): I just used the same password for root and user since I don't have any security issues at home... Change your icon if you wish Next

'Please halt your computer, remove the CD, restart...'

I clicked on the PCLOS icon in lower left, chose 'Log out', clicked on 'Restart Computer'

PCLOS looks like it's going to shut down, but opens optical tray and waits for you to remove CD, then hit Enter before it does so. PC restarts, and Ubuntu boots. As far as I could tell there was no PCLOS on the machine. Have faith.

In Ubuntu, open terminal, type in sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the timeout line, about 17 lines down from the top, and increase that to 10 or 15 seconds at least. Right after the Ubuntu memtest section, towards the bottom of menu.lst, add these three lines title PCLinuxOS rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1

Here's what the lower part of my menu.lst looked like after the additions... title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic quiet savedefault boot title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic (recovery mode) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda1 ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic boot title Ubuntu, memtest86+ root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin quiet boot title PCLinuxOS rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1

### END AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

Make sure to put a blank line above and below the new entries.

I tapped the Tab button to separate 'title' from 'PCLinuxOS', same for the other 2 lines. Worked out fine.

Save the changes, close out of terminal. Restart the PC.

On the next boot, Ubuntu's GRUB waits the amount of time that you just set in /boot/grub/menu.lst. I find 15 seconds to be a comfortable minimum. During the timeout you hit 'Esc' to enter GRUB list, scroll down to PCLinuxOS, hit Enter and you get an odd DOS-looking screen with some PCLOS boot options. Don't touch anything and PCLOS will boot in a few seconds.

Unless you want to log in as root, use the username and password that you created under the 'user' window several steps back. The username is on the screen, up in the left hand corner, so all you have to remember is the password. OK, some explanation of the 3 menu.lst entires are in order.

For those of you who think the command line is an unforgiving disciplinarian, you might get a kick out of this. If you type in title Toasted Cheese Sandwich then 'Toasted Cheese Sandwich' is what will show up in the GRUB menu during startup. You can type whatever you want as your title. Don't worry, it'll still successfully go to your Linux install.

The next line is not so forgiving. It MUST specify the correct partition, and that's expressed in GRUB- speak. For our model Linux says, “PCLOS is in hda2” but GRUB says, “PCLOS is in hd0,1”

That's still not very clear, is it? Let's say you wanted to make a triple-boot Linux PC. You made a third primary partition, then installed Mint Linux (and its bootloader!) to that partition. You would add three more entries to menu.lst, and they'd go like this: title Mint Linux rootnoverify (hd0,2) chainloader +1

Note: I wasn't just winging it when I wrote this guide. I took a HDD with Ubuntu on it, made a second partition, and went thru all of the above steps. I mistakenly typed (hd0,2) into menu.lst. Saved, rebooted, toggled down to 'PCLinuxOS' and GRUB followed my directions. Since hd0,2 was the extended partition, and there was no bootloader to be found, the screen set at “Starting up...” until I held down the power button and went looking for my mistake.

You now have most of the info you'd need to do a triple-boot, because the third line is always the same.

The only trick would be making sure to install GRUB to the distro's partition. That's because each one is different. Ubuntu gives you a little tiny box on the very last page of the installer for changing GRUB. It's easy to miss.