First time setting up a laptop capable of booting multiple Linux distributions      
I have this quite old laptop that had Ubuntu 16.04 LTS set up on. But then I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and wasn’t completely happy with it. So I was thinking of starting all over again but this time with multiple Linux distributions. I knew that I wanted my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS back and was thinking of installing Lubuntu 18.04 LTS. Just in case, I created 5+2 partitions for Linux and one for Windows. Continue reading to see how I did it. I was searching the web to get the information about how to set such a system up. I had some experience by having previously set up a system with Linux Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 8. At that time I was using Windows app to create a partition for Linux but this time I wanted to make everything in Linux. Booting up with Ubuntu 16.04 Live DVDSo, I started with booting up with Ubuntu 16.04 Live DVD that I had made a couple of years ago. I didn’t start by installing the Linux because I needed to set up the partitions for my new boot setup and separate partitions for each Linux distribution. Additionally, I made two partitions for my work and personal files that are shared between all the distributions. Note: I’m not a Linux expert nor expert on operating systems. The following is just my experience of trying to install multiple Linux distributions on my laptop. Creating boot, operating system and storage partitionsI started from making the whole hard drive unallocated space and created a completely new partition table. I chose the gpt partition table and created the following partitions:
Installing multiple Linux distributionsI reserved the fourth partition for Windows but I decided not to install it. I just wanted to test different Linux distributions so I started installing operating systems from the 5th partition /dev/sda5. The first distribution of Linux I installed was Ubuntu 16.04. I selected the 5th partition /dev/sda5 as the root of the operating system, file system remained ext4 and I checked the format option just in case. Then I just selected /dev/sda as the target drive to install the operating system and hit the install button. A swap was discovered automatically and all I had to do is continue installing the Ubuntu 16.04. To recap what I did:
Note: I didn’t set the mount points to storage partition 1 and 2 but I fixed it later. I suggest you set those points to the storage partitions because I had to face some problems while fixing my mistake. Fixing the mount points of storage partitionsAfter installing the first Linux distribution I noticed that the storage partitions were not mounted and I didn’t have access to write to the storage partition with ext4 file system. I had no problem with the ntfs partition but ext4 partition was owned by root and I had no use of it at this point. At first, I made a big mistake by opening the application Disks and changing the mount point of the storage 1 partition to /home. After doing that I was unable to log in to my Ubuntu 16.04 user desktop. So I went to the internet and started searching the solutions. Cleaning up the partition mount point disasterIt didn’t take me long to discover that I could just hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to bring up the terminal view. The good news was that I could still log in with my Ubuntu 16.04 username and password. The next task was to edit the /etc/fstab to fix the mount point error and get back the option to log in with my user. I tried to use the command sudo gedit /etc/fstab but I got an error saying that there was a problem with opening the gedit user interface. I got saved by the nano commandThen I discovered that I could open the /etc/fstab with a command in a terminal view. The saving command was sudo nano /etc/fstab. There I could easily edit the partition info, save the document and reboot. Just in case I didn’t change the value of the mount point but I deleted the whole line to be sure that I could still log in with my user. Going back to the mount point in DisksBeing a little wiser I went back to the Disks application and this time changed the mount point of the storage partition 1 to /storage. Later on, I went to change it to /home/user_name/storage. Installing the other Linux distributionsTo install the other distributions I did exactly the same as with Ubuntu 18.04 but used a different partition for each distribution. Last update: 2018-10-17 (Y,M,D) Read similar posts2018-10-17 First time setting up a laptop capable of booting multiple Linux distributions 2018-10-16 Linux Apps that I’m Using the Most in 2018 2018-09-26 Creating a multi-use footer template for all my websites 2017-03-06 How to clean folders using Linux 2017-03-06 My Top10 free Linux programs |
|
|
|
