Arch Linux

linerman

Member

Registered: 2021-02-16

Posts: 80

Managing Debian and Arch with one grub

Hi,

I have Debian and Arch installed on one partition (external SDD).
Boot is with grub legacy version.
I had Debian distro only, then added Arch.
I have noticed that I can not manage grub using Debian, because it breaks my Arch booting.
As far as I know, managing grub in such situation is using Arch only with os-prober.

So far so good;
If I upgrade kernel in Debian and remove some old one, then new debian kernel is appearing in the grub (after using eg. Grub customizer in Arch) but the old removed debian kernel is still visible in grub, am I right?
If so, how to safety delete such orphan entry?

And second thing - I am not sure whether it is linked to grub.
In the early days, booting Debian as the only distro with hidden grub made Debian bootsplash appears - so called plymouth theme.
Now when Arch is present and grub is visible (to have an option to choose distro), debian bootsplash is gone. Only kernel booting info is listed. And that applies only to Debian.
Arch booting is clear from kernel info.
My grub config regarding "quiet grub"

 quiet splash rd.udev.log_priority=3 vt.global_cursor_default=0 

respiranto

Member

Registered: 2015-05-15

Posts: 479

Website

Re: Managing Debian and Arch with one grub

First: Have you uninstalled the grub package on Debian?  Otherwise, it would soon override your grub installation done from Arch, since Debian reinstalls grub (not the package) on updates of certain packages.

You seem to plan on regenerating the grub.cfg regularly.  I assume os-prober adds entries for versioned versioned kernels and initrds (e.g., `/boot/vmlinuz-4.19.0-14-amd64').  `grub-mkconfigure' rewrites the whole grub.cfg; thus, it would definitely not contain entries to kernels and initrds no longer installed at the time of that rewriting.

In order to avoid the manual regeneration, I'd suggest to rely on Debian's friendly symbolic links to the latest and second latest pair of kernel and initrd (see also Debian:kernel-img.conf(5)).  To achieve that, you could either configure grub manually or just not use os-prober and add a custom file in `/etc/grub.d'.)

On Bootsplash: I have no idea.  You would probably need to configure the Debian kernel parameters (where /etc/default/grub does not apply; i.e., again manual configuration).