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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Several OS's on a single laptop? Post 302083925 by Perderabo on Tuesday 8th of August 2006 11:35:36 AM
Old 08-08-2006
Funny you should ask. I lost the drive on my laptop. I have a new 100 GB drive and I will soon rebuild it with as many OS's as I can shove in. I will post a detailed article explaining what steps I used after it's done.

What you want to do is a piece of cake. You will need a really good partition manager like Partition Magic. I am using Acronis Disksuite which is almost as good and a bit cheaper. Most bootloaders will short out if you try that many O S's. But Grub can handle it easily. I have heard of a product called "Boot It!" that might be able to as well. I even downloaded a trial version. But once I understood grub, I will never switch. That is the hard part...grub's documentation is terrible.

Some clues: before you start gather all of the documentation that you can about your hardware. Some of the installers will blindside with questions like "what is the vertical sync rate of your monitor?". One by one, install each OS is a dual boot config with windows. You will learn how much disk space is needed, what questions it will ask, and any other surprises will be exposed. Take notes on how much disk space was consumed in the filesystems with your installation choices. Also, audition the OS to see if you really want it on the final setup. If you can't get each of them to work in a dual boot config, you won't have a chance with the multi config.

The really hard part is the limited number of primary partitions. But you won't even consume them all. Use logical partitions where ever possible. Start with windows in a primary partition using NTFS and also with an E drive in a logical partition using FAT32. Linux can mount that too, possibly as /driveE to pass stuff around among the O S's. Consider having a logical partition for linux swap and for a (ext3) /tmp. All of the linux's can share these saving disk space. Linux will happily install completely in logical partitions. This will leave you with two free primaries. Install BSD in one of them. I don't let grub boot BSD natively, I chainload to the BSD bootloader, but it's your choice.

You will have a primary partition left over! If you have the disk space you can install another BSD or Solaris. Smilie
 

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APMSLEEP(1)															       APMSLEEP(1)

NAME
apmsleep - go into suspend or standby mode and wake-up later SYNOPSIS
apmsleep [-sSnwhVd] [--suspend] [--standby] [--noapm] [--wait] [--precise] [--help] [--version] [--debug] [+]hh:mm DESCRIPTION
Some computers, especially laptops, can wake-up from a low-power suspend to DRAM mode using the Real-time-clock (RTC) chip. Apmsleep can be used to set the alarm time in the RTC and to go into suspend or standby mode. An interrupt from the RTC causes the computer to wake-up. The program detects this event, by waiting for a leap in the kernel time and terminates successfully. If no time leap occurs within one minute, or something goes wrong, the exit value will be non-zero. The wake-up time can be specified in two formats: +hh:mm specifies a relative offset to the current time. The computer will suspend for exactly hh hours and mm minutes plus a few seconds to wake up. On some laptops, the timing is not completely accurate so it may be a few minutes (or more?) late. hh:mm specifies absolute local time in 24-hour format. The time stored in the RTC is not important. You may change the time zone used, with the TZ environment variable as usual. Daylight saving time is not obeyed in this version, but might be in a future release. WARNING: Do not close cover of laptop after suspending the laptop with apmsleep. Most laptops overheat when running with closed cover. Energy conservation with APM is little for a desktop. Turning of the screen will save 1/2, going into standby with drives turned off will save another 1/6th of the current. -V, --version Print the apmsleep program version and exit immediately. -s, --suspend Put the machine into suspend mode if possible (default). On my laptop, suspend mode turns off everything except the memory. -S, --standby Put the machine into standby mode if possible. On my laptop, standby mode turns off screen, hard disk, and CPU. -w, --wait Wait indefinitely for the time leap. -p, --precise Wait for alarm time to match actual time. Do not wait for time leap. This might be useful even without APM. -n, --noapm Do not call apm bios to suspend computer, just set the alarm clock and wait for time leap indefinitely. -d, --debug Print some information about what is going on. REQUIRED SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
Kernel The special character device /dev/rtc must exist and the kernel needs to be compiled with APM and RTC support. BIOS The computer must have the 'suspend to RAM' feature enabled in the BIOS; 'suspend to Disk' will not work, because the computer is turned off completely. You do not need to enable the ALARM timer, it will be activated by apmsleep. On some boards, you can config- ure which interrupts can be used to awake from suspend mode. If you have such a board, you might want to make sure that keyboard (IRQ 1) and RTC (IRQ 8) are among those interrupts. If your computer does not wake up, try to enable 'modem ring' in the BIOS, even if you do not have a modem. Privileges The program must be run as root or have the SUID attribute set (see chmod(1)). BUGS
Apmsleep cannot detect which event terminated the suspension. Possible events are: keyboard or mouse activity, modem ring, alarm from RTC, any other interrupt. Sometimes, the time leap is not detected properly (causing a wrong exit value). Should use APM BIOS calls to set alarm clock (not yet supported by kernel). This program was tested on a Winbook XL laptop (Pentium) only. It may not function on your hardware. AUTHOR
Written by Peter Englmaier (ppe@mpe.mpg.de) and may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The code is based on Paul Gortmacher's RTC test/example program. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program. The current maintainer is Peter Englmaier. SEE ALSO
xapm(1), apmd(8). January 2004 APMSLEEP(1)
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