[SOLVED] Dual booting Arch and Fedora

[shanx]

which one of them to install first?
i will partition as:
/boot (same for both)
/root (arch)
/swap (same for both)
/root (fedora)
/home (same for both)


thanx in advnce

[milomak]

i think arch still runs grub rather than grub2. if that is the case, i would go with arch first then fedora as it has os-prober.

i would also suggest that you have a seperate /boot for the individual distros. you can imagine the damage that can be done when both write to the same files (especially if you upgrade arch to grub2)..

---------- Post added at 10:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:48 PM ----------

i think arch still runs grub rather than grub2. if that is the case, i would go with arch first then fedora as it has os-prober.

i would also suggest that you have a seperate /boot for the individual distros. you can imagine the damage that can be done when both write to the same files (especially if you upgrade arch to grub2)..

[nonamedotc]

I don't know how good of an idea it is to share the same /home - I say this because of the following.

As I understand it, users are recognized by the uid. If you plan on using the same user for both operating systems, it will have issues with uid - Arch default is 100s and Fedora is 1000s. Alternatively, you could specify the UID for user in Arch to be in 1000s and it might work.

I would not recomment same / partition as well since they both follow rather diffferent principles in system boot/management - systemd vs *BSD-style init, for example.

I had a Arch fedora dual boot but with separate / and /home partitions for each. I installed Arch first and then installed Fedora and let fedora handle the grub. I then used fstab to mount the wanted data partitions ....

Hope this is good advice - more experienced users please correct me if something is wrong! Cheers.

[milomak]

i assumed by same /home he would create different directories for the users for each distro

good point about the uid. i would change the fedora uid as it seems to be the odd one out. in that most other distros use the same uid.

---------- Post added at 12:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:07 AM ----------

i assumed by same /home he would create different directories for the users for each distro

good point about the uid. i would change the fedora uid as it seems to be the odd one out. in that most other distros use the same uid.

[shanx]

okay....
what do you guys think of this- 'https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97121'?

[sea]

AFAIK: Most distros have UID's starting at 500, where Fedora has 1000 since, F15 or F16.
IF Arch has 100, allthought i thought it was 500 either, i'd change both UID's to 500, in case you're going to test for other distros as well.

Either way, if you dont share /home, for each distro a /home of 1gb suffices, if you have another extra partition with your videos, music, documents (symlinking to the distros /home/$USER dir.

You're line up looks well, i dont recall which grub Arch uses, but i thought it was grub2 too, so you could share /boot.
Adding a user and specify the UID like this:

sudo useradd shanx -u 500

And about which to install first, for me, it worked best when i installed Arch first, but didnt install grub to MBR, but to its first boot partition, while Fedora got installed to mbr.
But thats acutaly more a matter of preference.

Hth

EDIT:
Demian explained it quite good, just that it doesnt matter what kind of fs you choose for fedora-root (for instance, you wont be able to access fedora-root-btrfs from arch), the other suggestions are very accurate.

[shanx]

i am thinking of keeping /home in /root itself and setting up data partition then bind various folders on it to ~/Documents, ~/Videos, etc. on both installations, as told on arch forum
but how to bind it, what 'exactly' bind does?

[smr54]

From the mount man page (in CentOS)

The bind mounts.
Since Linux 2.4.0 it is possible to remount part of the file
hierarchy somewhere else. The call is
mount --bind olddir newdir
or shortoption
mount -B olddir newdir
or fstab entry is:
/olddir /newdir none bind

After this call the same contents is accessible in two places.
One can also remount a single file (on a single file).

You're probably better off putting in Arch first, as its version of Grub won't see Fedora, but Fedora's grub will see Arch. It's easy enough to put Fedora's grub back if you do it the other way though--mount Fedora, mount /proc and /dev with -o bind (and possibly /sys), then chroot to Fedora and reinstall its grub.

[shanx]

i partitioned like this:
bios_grub
/root fedora
/root arch
swap
data partion

no seperate home for any of them, i am binding thier homes to this data partition
and i didn't install grub in arch installation(i couldn't write MBR, it din't allowme coz of GPT) , just installed grub from fedora installation on /sda

thanx for help