It's been a while since our Getting Started article on multi-boot disk configurations. The old Solaris bootloader is long gone, in favor of the more flexible (and multiboot friendly) GRUB. ZFS is now available in both Solaris and OpenSolaris. The Branded Zones and Xen OpenSolaris projects are getting more interesting. And in making the best of a difficult situation, a laptop disk failure has given me an opportunity to re-think the original layout.

In addition to the project goals in the original article, here are some new capabilities that I would like to explore.

• Zones - I want to build zones, and lots of them. Solaris as well as Linux zones.
• Leverage Live Upgrade so that I can upgrade my system while winging my way across the US
• Consolidate all of my home directories into a small but useful set
• Be able to build OpenSolaris on a more regular basis
• Find a more efficient way of sharing a large Open Source repository across multiple OS instances
• Start using ZFS for more than just simple demonstrations
• Reserve some space to play with Linux distributions such as Fedora Core and Ubuntu
• GNOME 2.16 development builds for OpenSolaris

Before we proceed we need to make sure that the file systems will be sized properly. With only 80GB to work with, we will have to be efficient in a few places (like sharing the Software Companion, Blastwave repository, and Staroffice 8), even at the cost of a bit of complexity.

Estimated disk requirements

Component	Size	Notes
Solaris 10 Entire Software Group	4GB	The main boot environment will include Solaris 10, Staroffice 8, development tools, Software Companion, and Blastwave repository
Software Express (Nevada) Entire Software Group	5GB	Includes space for GNOME 2.16 development
OpenSolaris Nightly Build	5GB	BFU from Nevada or nightly build from source
Solaris 10 Software Companion	2GB	Installed in Solaris 10 /opt, shared in other installations
Staroffice 8	500MB	Installed in Solaris 10 /opt, shared in other installations
Compilers	1GB	Installed in Solaris 10 /opt, shared in other installations
Blastwave Repository	1GB	Installed in Solaris 10 /opt, shared in other installations
Swap	2GB	Not really needed for Solaris, but will be shared with Linux

Taking all of this into consideration, the new disk layout looks something like this.

Partition	Size	Type	Mount Point	Notes
1	12GB	NTFS	Window XP C: /xp	Read-only access under Linux using Linux-ntfs kernel modules No access from Solaris
2	44GB	Solaris UFS	s0 - S10 boot environment (8GB) s1 - swap s3 - Nevada boot environment (6GB) s4 - OpenSolaris boot environment (6GB) s5 - ZFS slice 1 (2GB) s6 - ZFS slice 2 (2GB) s7 - /export (16GB)	Solaris swap partition is available to Linux as /dev/hda9
4	22GB	Extended	N/A
5	4GB	FAT32	Windows XP E: /pc on Solaris (pcfs) and Linux (vfat)	Device name is /dev/hda5 in Linux and /dev/dsk/c0d0p0:1 in Solaris
6	10GB	Linux (ext3)	/	Linux root (today Fedora Core, may soon be Ubuntu as Fedora Core 5 was a major disappointment)
7	6GB	Linux (ext3)	/export	Shared home directory that can quickly be reused for CentOS 3 (for testing BrandZ things) and Ubuntu releases.

Next time, a short example of using Live Upgrade to install a new version of Solaris Express while running the Solaris 10 daily driver.

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