James Legg

So you want to dual boot Linux with OpenSolaris 2008.11?

I reinstalled my X40 ThinkPad the other day, just to satisfy myself that nothing had changed since last time I did an install from scratch. I normally just do a pkg image-update to get the latest builds. Turns out nothing much has changed since I last did it.

I have Ubuntu 8.10 on this laptop for the occasional Linux application, and just because I like to play with things. What I did forget to to do before I installed it was to copy my Ubuntu grub menu.lst to a USB stick or the network. So once I installed OpenSolaris it stomped all over my Ubuntu grub menu. No problems though, the Linux partitions are still there, I just need to tell grub where they are.

So to mount my Linux partition I use the FSWpart and FSWfsmisc packages from the Belinix OpenSolaris Distribution.

james@ickle:~/Download$ wget http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/binfiles/FSWpart.tar.gz

james@ickle:~/Download$ gzcat FSWpart.tar.gz | tar xf -
james@ickle:~/Download$ pfexec pkgadd -d . FSWpart

Processing package instance <FSWpart> from </export/home/james/Download>

x86 Partition Table Dumper(i386) 0.1
#
# Copyright 2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
# Use is subject to license terms.
#
# Author Moinak Ghosh
#
Using </> as the package base directory.
## Processing package information.
## Processing system information.
## Verifying disk space requirements.
## Checking for conflicts with packages already installed.
## Checking for setuid/setgid programs.

Installing x86 Partition Table Dumper as <FSWpart>

## Installing part 1 of 1.
/usr/bin/prtpart
/usr/bin/prtpart.bin
/usr/share/src/prtpart.c
[ verifying class <none> ]

Installation of <FSWpart> was successful.

james@ickle:~/Download$ wget http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/FSWfsmisc.tar.gz

james@ickle:~/Download$ gzcat FSWfsmisc.tar.gz | tar xvf

james@ickle:~/Download$ pfexec pkgadd -d . FSWfsmisc

So thats the packages added, now we need to figure out which disk we want to mount.

 james@ickle:~$ pfexec prtpart

Fdisk information for device /dev/rdsk/c4d0p0

Block Size : 512 bytes
Controller : ide
Disk       : cmdk
Capacity   : 37 GB

#  start block  # nblocks    startCylSecHd endCylSecHd   OSType
 1: 0056500605   0002104515    ff/ff/fe    ff/ff/fe      Linux swap
 2: 0058605120   0019535040    ff/ff/fe    ff/ff/fe      Linux native
 3: 0000016065   0056259630     1/ 1/ 0    ff/ff/fe      Solaris x86

This just shows us the disks in the system (highlighted in red above), my laptop like most only has the one. If we re-run the command specify that disk and the -ldevs switch it will print us out the names of each fdisk partion device.

james@ickle:~$ pfexec prtpart /dev/rdsk/c4d0p0 -ldevs

Fdisk information for device /dev/rdsk/c4d0p0

** NOTE **
/dev/dsk/c4d0p0      - Physical device referring to entire physical disk
/dev/dsk/c4d0p1 - p4 - Physical devices referring to the 4 primary partitions
/dev/dsk/c4d0p5 ...  - Virtual devices referring to logical partitions

Virtual device names can be used to access EXT2 and NTFS on logical partitions

/dev/dsk/c4d0p1    Linux swap
/dev/dsk/c4d0p2    Linux native
/dev/dsk/c4d0p3    Solaris x86

As we can see our above our Linux Native partion is /dev/dsk/c4d0p2 - mine is formatted with ext3 but you seem to be able to get away with mounting as ext2 read only and avoiding the journalling features of ext3. (obviously you have everything important backed up right?)

so lets mount it:

james@ickle:~$ pfexec mount -F ext2fs /dev/dsk/c4d0p2 /mnt

Copy the menu.lst file that controls the grub menu from the Ubuntu partition and then unmount it.

james@ickle:~$ cp  /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst ubuntu-menu.lst

james@ickle:~$ pfexec umount /mnt

OK great so know we have to pull the important bits out of the ubuntu menu.lst file, fire up your favorite editor and move down to the section that looks like:

 james@ickle:~$ vim ubuntu-menu.lst 

## ## End Default Options ##

title           Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=909c5a3d-f514-45f1-9aaa-60f6d77d4d14 ro quiet splash
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic
quiet

title           Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic (recovery mode)
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=909c5a3d-f514-45f1-9aaa-60f6d77d4d14 ro  single
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic

title           Ubuntu 8.10, memtest86+
root            (hd0,1)
kernel          /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

 Copy the text and fire up another editor:

 james@ickle:~$ pfexec vim /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst

Add the paste buffer after the last line in the file

 Remember the the Linux menu.lst is updated automatically on the Linux partition by Ubuntu when you install new kernels so you will need to repeat this process when you update Ubuntu.

 The alternative to this is to chain load your Linux Grub from your Solaris Grub and avoid the tedious job of manually updating the menu.lst that lives on the ZFS partition with your Linux kernel entries. If I find some time I'll write about that as well.

I'm pretty sure that grub/OpenSolaris find windows partitions and boot them by default. I don't use Windows out of VirtualBox much these days so I am not sure about that one.

Posted at 11:00PM Mar 18, 2009 by James Legg in Personal  |  Comments[3]