Successful Triple Boot

Well, I took the plunge yesterday and decided I wanted to check out SUSE 10.1 since I had heard very good things about it on the M90. I used gparted Live CD to add another partition to my hard drive for SUSE and popped in the DVD. Here is my current setup:

Partition 1: 47MB for Dell diagnostics (extended)
Partition 2: ~60 gigs for Windows XP Pro
Partition 3: ~20 gigs for Windows Vista Beta 2 (soon to be RC1)
Partition 4: 15 gigs for SUSE Linux 10.1

SUSE was really great with installation. It automatically detected my partition which I had formatted to ext3 and set up its own /root and /home and swap partitions within that partition and installed perfectly. Almost every bit of my hardware was detected automatically. Then only thing I don't know whether it is working or not is the Media Card Reader. I haven't had time to test that yet. The biggest hurdles I had were getting the nVidia drivers installed and both KDE and Gnome desktops. The latter wasn't too hard after I read around online. And as for the nVidia drivers... I finally decided to give up on the YaST2 built-in method and just compile the drivers myself. The only thing that sucks is that I'm gonna have to reinstall the drivers for every kernel update... but at least I have 3D acceleration now.

As for GRUB... the SUSE GRUB menu comes up at start up and gives me the options of 'SUSE 10.1, windows 1, windows 2, and SUSE Failsafe mode.' I changed the 'windows 1 and windows 2' to Windows XP and Windows Vista respectively. But choosing Windows Vista gives a chainloader error since XP is set to be my default Windows boot. Instead, I just choose Windows XP and this takes me to the Vista bootloader. After that, everything works like a charm. Just took a few hours to get everything worked out.

 

Yeah the SUSE installer has always been really nice. They gear themselves more toward "business" users, so it's all nice and straight-forward.

 

Well, I no longer have SUSE on here. I was really happy with having a triple boot, but after I upgraded my Vista Beta 2 install to RC1, grub got fried. I tried about ten times to repair grub using the SUSE DVD, the GParted LiveCD, and the Ubuntu LiveCD. I tried doing an OS repair, but it failed every time. I tried restoring it from the command line, but it kept telling me that either it couldn't mount the drive or it couldn't write to the drive. Finally I decided to just reformat the partition to NTFS and use it as a data partition for Vista and XP. Maybe if I get a new DVD-ROM for my old C640 I'll load it up on there with Ubuntu. I really liked the distro. And I had just gotten the nVidia drivers compiled and 3D acceleration working properly and everything. Oh well. At least if one of my Windows installs does get fried again, at least all my data will be safe on its own partition by itself.

 

Well that sucks... And why am i not surprised that Vista hosed your bootloader...? Can't run something other than microsoft, now can we?

 

Yeah, it does suck. But I'm moving over to Vista as my primary OS, and it requires a bit more space. Although SUSE bit as much out of my hard drive as Vista. While it was a pretty nice OS, it was quite bloated. There was a LOT of stuff in there. More stuff than I really wanted. That's one reason I like Ubuntu. It's much lighter for the install and only requires a CD instead of a DVD. And I find the Synaptic Package manager and apt-get to be much more efficient and easier to use than YaST.

 

Like I said before, SUSE is built with business users in mind. So it installs everything you might need by default. Which is usually more than a home user would need.
Yeah, I like Ubuntu also, I need to redo one of my boxes actually.

 

I use FreeBSD 6.1 and XP on the 40 GB internal disk in my 3623 and boot the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 from and external USB drive very nicely.

 

notebook_ftw try SLED 10
It works bootifully on the M90 - u wont need to compile video drivers or anything, just make sure u'r connected to the ethernet while installing - it will automatically go to Nvidia's site and download real binary drivers. Graphics looks wicked awesome in SLED at WUXGA, with 3d desktop and all.
I will be making a post on my installation experience soon.

And I recommend "smart" package manager - its supposed to supersede rpm,yast,apt-get etc. U just say what package u want and it'll go and automatically download and install those packages for ya.

The final X-display is so awesome it brinks tears to my eyes.

 

well, I've got windows, linux and mac on my macbok

 

Gee, have you compare battery life on these three? It would be nice to see a report about this.

I would say windows is the most OS non-friendly. They always think they are the only one, sucks. I install Ubuntu right after I install XP, and work on Linux all the time. Just leave an empty XP there if I "really" need it by any chance.

 

rockharder well, what can I say, now, i barely use linux or windows. I got all the linux utilties I need on Mac OS X (I even got apt-get lol) But well, I worked once on linux on batteries and it drainned just like on windows. It would also depend on what apps are u using. I have kubuntu and indeed, kde, so it is a cpu intensive desktop. And on windows.... well, the time I drained the battery it lasted me 2:30 and it was like 75%. But, I was using Mechanical Desktop so I don't know how intensive it is.

The only thing I wish I had on mac from linux is packet injection and software to analize wireless networks and so on. I don't know if its possible in linux with this macbook.