Arch Linux

rberyl

Member

Registered: 2012-12-29

Posts: 1

Dual booting Arch and Ubuntu

Hi, I would like to dual boot Arch and Ubuntu using GRUB2.
I already have Arch, set up as it's described in the Beginner's Guide, with GRUB2 installed. How would I go about dual booting Ubuntu, preferably without overwriting the existing bootloader?
I haven't tried anything yet, but the problem that I can see is resizing my /home; is this possible on the Ubuntu liveDVD? If not, would I be able to resize /home with my gParted liveCD?
Unfortunately, I have no backup media to use, so I wouldn't be able to transfer anything away as a backup.
Here is my partition table:

%lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE       RO TYPE      MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0       0        931.5G   0    disk
├─sda1   8:1    0        30G        0    part       /
├─sda2   8:2    0        12G        0    part       [SWAP]
├─sda3   8:3    0        5M          0    part
└─sda4   8:4    0        889.5G   0    part       /home

sda1 is my root partition, sda2 is swap, sda3 is GRUB's boot partition, which I was told that I needed in the guide, and sda4 (/home) occupies the "rest of the disk".
I am using a GPT-partitioned drive, as I read this has many advantages and I do not plan to triple-boot Windows.
So, can someone tell me what I do if I want to dual boot Ubuntu? I'm very sorry if this should have been posted on the Ubuntu forums, but I'm just more familiar with Arch, and I already have it installed. Please ask if you need any other files like my fstab. I have my Ubuntu liveDVD, GParted live CD (and Arch CD) at hand.

Thanks in advance, rberyl.
(Also, does anyone else think it's a bit of a backwards thing to put the output of "date -u +%W$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'" as a sign-up question? )

Last edited by rberyl (2012-12-29 11:45:23)

smazza

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2012-12-27

Posts: 8

Re: Dual booting Arch and Ubuntu

Hi rberyl,

You can change your partitions using an inbuilt tool like cfdisk, or if you'd prefer a GUI gparted can be installed from the Arch repos. This will allow you to shrink sda4, and set up the new partitions for your Ubuntu OS. Although this shouldn't cause any data loss, its best practice to back up just in case.

When installing Ubuntu, be sure to opt-out of bootloader creation. I think you have to use the alternate installation media to get this option. You can add your Ubuntu partition to the existing bootloader by running osprober (available from the repos) and then running grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg . Alternatively, you can manually edit your GRUB config. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GR … NU.2FLinux for instructions.

Good luck!

Last edited by smazza (2012-12-29 16:04:08)

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I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all

shulamy

Member

From: israel

Registered: 2010-09-11

Posts: 466

Re: Dual booting Arch and Ubuntu

and you can let ubuntu install grub

and use it instead of arch's grub.

ezik