Roger Whittaker

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Multi-booting on Samsung N310 netbook

Monday 4th January 2010

I've been having fun playing with this netbook and installing multiple operating systems (currently 4) on it.

At the moment it looks like this:

 
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders 
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes 
Disk identifier: 0x25db3a89 

 
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sda1   *           1        4864    39070048+  bf  Solaris 
/dev/sda2            4865        9728    39070080   a5  FreeBSD 
/dev/sda3            9729       14953    41969812+  83  Linux 
/dev/sda4           14954       19457    36178380    5  Extended 
/dev/sda5           14954       15196     1951866   82  Linux swap / Solaris 
/dev/sda6           15197       17012    14586988+  83  Linux 
/dev/sda7           17013       19457    19639431   83  Linux 

OpenSolaris 2009.06 in the first partition (installed from a USB stick from the LOSUG Christmas meeting) works fine except that the network card (11ab:4354) didn't work out of the box.

But the myk driver from here worked fine and the instructions included with it for compiling were perfect. Wireless and webcam work "out of the box".

FreeBSD 8.0 in the second partition works fine but a few things baffled me at first. In particular the need for hald_enable="YES" and dbus_enable="YES" as well as enabling kdm with

ttyv8 "/usr/local/kde4/bin/kdm -nodaemon" xterm on secure"

in /etc/ttys.

Wireless works with a static configuration but I haven't discovered a NetworkManager equivalent.

I installed openSUSE 11.2 into the extended partition and everything works (of course :)). (Though as with Ubuntu, the OpenSolaris partition got selected as swap on the basis of its partition ID, and I had to make sure that it was definitely de-selected).

I installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (from a USB stick made from the ISO using Unetbootin) in the third partition, and this messed up the booting of everything else, although I chose "Advanced" and chose to "install boot loader to /dev/sda3". I was trying to boot everything from the OpenSolaris GRUB installed in the active first partition, with generic boot code in the MBR. I haven't quite worked out what happened, and I'm not necessarily blaming the Ubuntu installer -- I need to test this again. But I had to restore the grub setup from the OpenSolaris media:

installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c8d0s0

And I had to use the openSUSE "repair" system to re-setup its grub - odd.