2008-11-27

Installing KUbuntu alongside Fedora

What decided me to try Kubuntu is the updated Miro version, the one that allow to download Youtube chanels. Ubuntu has it, but Fedora is lagging a bit behind. (Notice that Mandriva and Suse had it too).
Besides, the Fedora 10 Feature list didn't excite me.

In order to install Kubuntu alongside Fedora on a free LVM volume, I decided to use UNetBootIn. There are no RPM, you have to download it from sourceforge. Since it is only one single exec, there are no problems.

So, you just launch unetbootin, choose which distribution to install, I choosed Ubuntu 8.10 Net install. It download a little file and ask for reboot.

I rebooted and choose "Unetbootin" in the Grub menu. It launches Ubuntu's install.
Partitionning is the scary part: Ubuntu doesn't help you much to choose the right LVM volume ! Basically, don't use your existing /boot, choose to config LVM and only mount the LVM volume that will contain Ubuntu. It still says that it will change the partition table, but luckily, it didn't break too much things.
I did a bare lightweight install (no X server).

Ubuntu's install changed the partition's UUID. Normally, it wouldn't have been a concern. But I used to configure Fedora's fstab to mount it under /mnt/ubuntu. So when I booted back to Fedora it falls short on a "Repair System" shell. Just because it couldn't find the UUID anymore !! Anyway after some Googling, I remounted the filesystem in read/write mode : "mount -w -o remount /" as seen in Linux Forum and just commented the bad line.

After rebooting, I used system-config-lvm (don't know why it doesn't appear in the menu) to mount the kubuntu partition back on /mnt/ubuntu. Then I wanted to copy the /mnt/ubuntu/boot/ to /boot/ and add Ubuntu to the Grub menu. But I only had to updated Grub to add the Ubuntu menu. The file were already in /boot/ : I wonder if UNetbootin copied them there in order to boot the install ?

Anyway, I just rebooted and choose "Ubuntu" in the Grub menu. It reached quickly a standard shell where I did a sudo apt-get kubuntu-desktop, triggering the download of not less than 1,5Go of deb files. But I know that I can switch from one to the other systems.

After rebooting, I still have to configure the NVIDIA drivers, since it gives me a blank screen yet ...

2023 summary

  Life is bigger than what you can imagine.  Still using Roam  http://www.roamresearch.com/  to take notes Still using Mastodon mainly, but ...