As part of my “Swiss Knife Computer” adventure, I wanted a full linux system on a flash drive that I could use on the different computers I own. Using an 8 GB flash drive I installed the Debian Squeeze 386 desktop on it. I read many of the USB install instruction on the net. Most were confusing to me so I decided to plug in the USB and try a normal install as I do with the SATA hard drives. The install was slow due to the flash drive speed but with out problems.
I installed GRUB to the Flash drive disk at /dev/sdc and rebooted the machine. My BIOS is set to boot the CD, USB then the Win7 hard drive in that order. I was supprised that GRUB displayed not only the USB Debian install but all of the other installations on the computer! Now I have a boot USB too! This is how I did it —
I installed the KDE 32 bit version several times before starting this blog.
Installation is a time consuming process and requires (according to the instructions) the partitions to be setup before installation.
That said, the first item in the installation dumped me into fdisk or the other partition program. I do my partition work with Gparted so I began with the selection that alowed me to choose partitions. When partitions are ready installation begins with a menu of items to complete.
This time I installed the 64bit version. There are problems that are not resolved at this time. I found most info here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ Lots of good links on this page!
INSTALL ARCH LINUX with Gnome 3 desktop
This will be easy! Already installed it with KDE several times in the multi-boot system. - This will be a peice of cake!
NOT!
Not by any stretch of the imagination. A 2 hour job has now stretched into the second day. Murphy is alive and well. On the 4th fresh install attempt finally have ARCH up and running multi-boot with Gnome 3 desktop, dual monitors and the Firefox browser installed.
I did the torrent download of “debian-6-0-4-AMD64 netinst iso and burned it to a CD. Installation with the gnome desktop was easy and without any hick-ups.
With and extra computer and no commitment for it, I decided to build a “Swiss Knife” or multi-boot box. Started this project in January and really learned how to install linux distributions. Plans are a machine with Windows 7 Pro on a 750 GB hard drive and use Virtual Box to expermint with. The second hard drive, 1 TB, will have 5 or more linux distributions. This is how I plan to accomplish it.
Tags: create multi boot, multi boot