Triple booting Windows XP, Ubuntu, Kubuntu

[Guest]

So I've been dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu for a while. So now I have decided that I want to add Kubuntu to the mix and start triple booting the three of them. I've looked for info on triple booting the three of them but I can only find sites about booting Windows XP, Vista/7, and Ubuntu. Can anyone lead me to an article that deals with booting two linux distros with Windows XP?

[Snowhog]

Re: Triple booting Windows XP, Ubuntu, Kubuntu

Let's be clear. When you say you're dual booting, do you mean that you installed Ubuntu 'outside' of Windows XP, or did you use wubi to install Ubuntu 'inside' of Windows XP?

[ejazzkatt]

Re: Triple booting Windows XP, Ubuntu, Kubuntu


I have Windows XP installed on this laptop. I also installed Ubuntu on it but I prefer Kubuntu so I installed it too. Ubuntu shows up on the Grub boot menu and not Kubuntu. But at the login screen, I can choose to boot either Kubuntu or Ubuntu.

Eric

[Snowhog]

Re: Triple booting Windows XP, Ubuntu, Kubuntu

But at the login screen, I can choose to boot either Kubuntu or Ubuntu.

By your description, you didn't install Kubuntu, but rather, installed from within Ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop package. That, or prior to installing Kubuntu you gave KDE a try by installing kubuntu-desktop within Ubuntu, found that you liked it, and decided to install it from a LiveCD. If that is true, and you installed Karmick Koala 9.10 or the "in testing" Lucid Lynx, then that installation came with Grub 2. If you didn't, and it seems likely, that you opted to install Grub 2 into the root partition of the new install, and not to the MBR, then the Ubuntu Grub (legacy) won't see the new installation of Kubuntu. That was my case when I installed Kubuntu 9.10 on my dual-boot Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 setup, both of which use Grub Legacy.

Editing your existing Ubuntu Grub menu.lst to add the Kubuntu entry is easy enough. In my case, Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 is on my first partition, Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 on the third partition, and Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 on the second partition. In my Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 grub menu.lst, the other two OSs are listed using chainloader notation as follows:

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root

title Ubuntu GNU/Linux - Karmic 9.10 (KDE)
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

title Ubuntu GNU/Linux - Jaunty 9.04 (Gnome)
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1