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The other day I was asked about details of multiboot configurations. I did recommend playing with it and switching off secure boot for the time being. Somehow this conversation made me wonder. Installing Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and OpenSuse side by side is completely boring for me. However, the world of operating systems is fairly large with lesser known areas.
I installed Debian 11 on an underused notebook, but I left plenty of space after it's 3 partitions (efi, root, swap). Then I created three more partitions there (32 GB each). In one I installed alpinelinux. It took a bit of looking around in the wiki, it took a second attempt to get the bit about uefi boot right, but then setup-disk was completing without errors.
Now, how to make the new shiny thing visible in grub? This turned out to be very simple. I rebootet into Debian and called update-grub and that was it. What a pleasant surprise! Thanks to everyone who made this slick and easy!
For future reference, after booting into the live/installer image from a USB flash drive:
apk add e2fsprogs mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda6 mount -t ext4 /dev/sda6 /mnt mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi setup-timezone setup-alpine -q setup-sshd setup-ntp apk add efibootmgr grub-efi export BOOTLOADER=grub export USE_EFI=1 setup-disk -m sys /mnt
By now I added sway, emacs, and some more to the installation, and it's mostly usable for me.
Then I tried to install openbsd into the mix. On the notebook used in part 1 I ruined the install stick with fdisk. Only after a bit of staring at the unusual collection of characters, I realized, that fdisk did not see the internal M.2 disk at all. So I tried the whole procedure on an older notebook featuring a true SATA disk. And yes, now fdisk as part of the openbsd installer saw the internal disk and the existing GPT partition table. I even managed to persuade fdisk to create 2 slices in the desired partition (a rootfs, b swap) and it seemed happy. The installation completed without error messages.
However, the evening was already somewhat late and I failed to make grub boot the openbsd installation. Probably something about UEFI, or about chainloading or about kopenbsd or whatever. So some more fiddling is needed.
Today I searched some more. I would have prefered to use grub to load the bootloader on the openbsd partition. But maybe UEFI boot has somehow different expectations, which I am not aware of. Installing reFInd on the Debian partition solved this problem without further ado. So I was able to log in and marvel somewhat at the tiny system. 35 processes instead of the approx. 200 on my main Debian workstation. The comparison is a bit unfair, I'm sure.
Now I can fiddle with the stuff found on Solenes tech blog.
If anyone happens to know the magic incantations for grub, I'd still be interested.
There is no shortage of whacky ideas, though:
How about installing SculptOS/genode in another partition? Is that even possible?
How about Debian GNU/kfreebsd?
plan9/inferno, anyone?
Is the above setup still possible if enabling secure boot?
And how about disk encryption?
I checked distrowatch today and added Solus, TinyCore, Manjaro, NixOS, and even Haiku to the list of candidates. I see yet another time sink developing here.
Happy hacking,
~ew
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