Dual Booting LL 2.0 with other Ubuntu (14.04) based distros

[gold_finger]

When I boot  LL 2.0, in either a dual- or multi-boot system (all Linux based), it mounts the partition or partitions (e.g. '40 GB Volume' shown below an icon of the drive) for the other OS or OS-es on the top left-hand side of the desktop screen.  With the system I have, both Zorin OS and Elementary OS, do not do this. Is there something I can do to prevent these automounting on the screen?

I don't think the other partitions are actually being mounted.  You are probably just seeing icons for them placed on the desktop.  If you double-click the icons, then they will be mounted.  If you open the file manager and look along left-hand side you will see those partitions listed, but you should notice that they are slightly grayed out -- meaning they are not mounted.  If you click them, then they will be mounted.

If you don't want to see their icons on the desktop, just open Menu -> Settings Manager -> Desktop -> Icons (tab) and uncheck "Removable Devices".

[m654321]

Gold_finger, just one small question before I hit the 'solve' button (I found the 'topic solved' button at the bottom of the last post on the LHS of the screenview ) ...

My question...
When I boot  LL 2.0, in either a dual- or multi-boot system (all Linux based), it mounts the partition or partitions (e.g. '40 GB Volume' shown below an icon of the drive) for the other OS or OS-es on the top left-hand side of the desktop screen.  With the system I have, both Zorin OS and Elementary OS, do not do this. Is there something I can do to prevent these automounting on the screen?

Summarizing for the record...
The binding to a separate DATA partition worked really well for the dual boot system with LL2 and Zorin 9. Just for the record, I extended this to include the permissible maximum of four OSes on sda (i.e. I installed LL2.0, Zorin6, Zorin9 & Elementary (Luna) on sda - all Ubuntu based), and used sdb for the shared DATA partition and common Swap partition. When installing the different OSes one-by one, I used the 'something else' option at setup, to partition the drives. All the partitions were set up as 'logical partitions', though this probably doesn't matter as I did not exceed 4 partitions on either sda or sdb. 

Kind regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

Alright then, you're all set.

Go ahead and mark the post as solved.  I think there might be a way to put green check mark on post to signify that it is solved, but don't know exactly where that would be.  If can't find that, go to very first post on the thread, click "Modify" button, then just add <SOLVED> to the Subject title.

[m654321]

EDIT:  I just thought of something that I forgot to ask you before.  Did you have any Virtual Machines created in VirtualBox before you bound the "VirtualBox_VMs" folder to the DATA partition?  If you did, you won't be able to see those anymore.  They will still exist, but you won't be able to access them with the bind in effect.  I can give you instructions on how to find them and transfer them to the DATA partition if you run into that problem.  Let me know if you need to do that.

I did have a couple of virtual machines before but I saved them both to  my external drive in their VirtualBox folder, before doing a clean install of the OSes, followed by binding to DATA partition.  By doing that I seem to have saved myself some extra work, judging from your above comment. 

Yes, I'm really pleased I've got this far with linux, being a complete newbie in April (from Win XP) and without any prior programming experience. I am getting into it, though have to admit I don't always understand what I'm doing, though with time everything will become clearer (as it already is), bit-by-bit. Many thanks for all your careful advice gold_finger, though suspect I'll be in touch again sometime...

Regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

Excellent!  Sounds like you've got it all working right now.  Good job! 

I ran the command 'ls -l /etc/init' in terminal and got the following output for bind-home.conf. I appear to have ownership by 'root' but, the file seems to have been duplicated, the difference being the tilde symbol following the second entry (see below). Should the second entry be deleted. How should I do this??

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  864 Aug 25 05:56 bind-home.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  864 Aug 25 05:49 bind-home.conf~

When you see a file with a tilde at the end, that is just a backup copy.  You can keep or delete it -- it's up to you.  Sometimes the text editor may have it set under its preferences to save a backup copy of files that get edited.  Maybe either gedit or leafpad has that set right now (probably gedit).  You can disable that by just unchecking that preference.

Nothing wrong with installing gedit -- it's just another text editor with a few more features than leafpad.  You can keep and use both of them on the system -- they won't conflict with each other.

EDIT:  I just thought of something that I forgot to ask you before.  Did you have any Virtual Machines created in VirtualBox before you bound the "VirtualBox_VMs" folder to the DATA partition?  If you did, you won't be able to see those anymore.  They will still exist, but you won't be able to access them with the bind in effect.  I can give you instructions on how to find them and transfer them to the DATA partition if you run into that problem.  Let me know if you need to do that.

[m654321]

Gold_finger, as you suggested, I filled up the gaps in the folder names in the bind-home.conf file (with hyphen), as well as in the /mnt/DATA and /home/m-ll2 folders. Following reboot, right-clicking on any of the folders in /home/m-ll2 indicates 924GB free so they appear to me to have all bound successfully to /mnt/DATA on the 1TB drive at sdb. I assume that's a correct asumption.  The only other thing on sdb is the swap partition (I abandoned a separate '/home' for each OS and have adopted the system that you more or less use. 

I ran the command 'ls -l /etc/init' in terminal and got the following output for bind-home.conf. I appear to have ownership by 'root' but, the file seems to have been duplicated, the difference being the tilde symbol following the second entry (see below). Should the second entry be deleted. How should I do this??

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  864 Aug 25 05:56 bind-home.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  864 Aug 25 05:49 bind-home.conf~

You ask me a few things. I installed gedit and used this to create the upstart file, though think I might have used leafpad initially, so may still have an erroneous leafpad file floating out there (!) I did use sudo to open and edit the bind-home.conf file (I used terminal, not file manager) but now realize my error (thanks to your advice) and am now using gksu.

Many thanks for your continued support.
Regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

What should I see when I reboot & open the  '/home'  folder? I don't see the DATA folder , when I open the File Manager.

The 13 folders in the above .conf file have been created in the subfolder 'DATA' within the folder 'mnt', as I saw them under file system  (there is also an additional one called lost+found there).

You won't see the DATA folder in /home/m-ll2.  You bound the 13 sub-folders of DATA to your home, but you didn't bind the DATA folder itself to home.

The "lost+found" is normal.  It will be automatically generated to allow you to use the Trash function on the partition.


Your "bind-home.conf" file looks good except for a few lines.  The lines I have in red below are most likely not currently working properly:

mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Documents /home/m-ll2/Documents
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Downloads /home/m-ll2/Downloads
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Linux ISOs /home/m-ll2/Linux ISOs
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Music /home/m-ll2/Music
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Photos family /home/m-ll2/Photos family
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Photos general /home/m-ll2/Photos general
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Pictures /home/m-ll2/Pictures
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Public /home/m-ll2/Public
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Templates /home/m-ll2/Templates
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/TV /home/m-ll2/TV
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Videos /home/m-ll2/Videos
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/VirtualBox VMs /home/m-ll2/VirtualBox VMs
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Wallpapers /home/m-ll2/Wallpapers

Having spaces in the names of your files and/or folders can cause problems when you try to run commands like those in the bind-home.conf file.  For example, when the system tries to run the command mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Linux ISOs /home/m-ll2/Linux ISOs, it will interpret that as you trying to bind /mnt/DATA/Linux to a place called ISOs because of the space that it encounters between the two words.

You have a choice to make.  Either rename those folders in both /mnt/DATA and /home/m-ll2 and change their respective lines in bind-home.conf file; or either "escape" the spaces or quote the folder names with spaces in them in your bind-home.conf file.

Eg. To change the names, simply use a ".", "-", or "_" in place of the spaces.  Change Linux ISOs to Linux_ISOs, for example.

Eg.  If you keep the spaces in the names, you need to remember to either escape the spaces by putting a backslash character before each space in the name, or put the entire name within quote marks when running commands on those files.  Example of escaping same file as above would be Linux\ ISOs.  Or quote the whole thing, "Linux ISOs"

Personally, I find it much easier to not have names with spaces and just use ".", "-", or "_" in place of a space.  That way I don't have to remember to escape or quote things.

NOTE:  If you change the name of "VirtualBox VMs" folder to "VirtualBox_VMs", you will need to follow my instructions here to tell the VirtualBox program its new default machine folder.  Otherwise it will keep looking for things in "VirtualBox VMs", which will no longer exist.

After I've created the upstart job, should I be doing anything else, e.g. with the terminal?

No need to do any more with terminal.  The bind-home.conf file should be saved (as root) to the /etc/init directory.  To check ownership of the file, open a terminal and enter:

Code: [Select]

ls -l /etc/init
You'll get a long output of lines.  Scroll back to beginning of the output to find the line for bind-home.conf and make sure it shows that it is owned by root (you'll see "root  root" on the line).  Output should look similar to mine shown here:

I have just rebooted after saving & closing the above file. I get this message in the terminal whenever I open, save and close the above file....(gedit:2270): IBUS-WARNING **: The owner of /home/m-ll2/.config/ibus/bus is not root! ...maybe there is a problem here.

I'm not sure what that error message is.  I'm assuming you installed gedit and are using that instead of leafpad.  Exactly how did you try opening the bind-home.conf file?  Through the file manager, or with a terminal command?

If you used a terminal command, did you use sudo gedit /etc/init/bind-home.conf or gksu gedit /etc/init/bind-home.conf?  When you open GUI programs (like the text editor) as root, you should use gksu instead of sudo.  Maybe that is what caused the error message.

[m654321]

In the end I simplified things and used more or less the partition system you have, i.e. without separate /home partitions
I have a question about 'binding' - I think I've made a mistake somewhere.

This is the content the upstart job, copied & pasted from the file "bind-home.conf" that I set up...

# Remount partitions with bind
#
description "Bind DATA Partition Subdirectories to My Home Directory"

start on stopped mountall

script
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Documents /home/m-ll2/Documents
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Downloads /home/m-ll2/Downloads
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Linux ISOs /home/m-ll2/Linux ISOs
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Music /home/m-ll2/Music
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Photos family /home/m-ll2/Photos family
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Photos general /home/m-ll2/Photos general
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Pictures /home/m-ll2/Pictures
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Public /home/m-ll2/Public
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Templates /home/m-ll2/Templates
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/TV /home/m-ll2/TV
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Videos /home/m-ll2/Videos
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/VirtualBox VMs /home/m-ll2/VirtualBox VMs
mount --bind /mnt/DATA/Wallpapers /home/m-ll2/Wallpapers
end script

After I've created the upstart job, should I be doing anything else, e.g. with the terminal? I have just rebooted after saving & closing the above file. I get this message in the terminal whenever I open, save and close the above file....(gedit:2270): IBUS-WARNING **: The owner of /home/m-ll2/.config/ibus/bus is not root! ...maybe there is a problem here.


What should I see when I reboot & open the  '/home'  folder? I don't see the DATA folder , when I open the File Manager.

The 13 folders in the above .conf file have been created in the subfolder 'DATA' within the folder 'mnt', as I saw them under file system  (there is also an additional one called lost+found there).

Many thanks for any help on this.
Regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

I used symlinks myself for a while and they worked fine.  Then, out of curiosity (like you), I tried doing it with bind -- which works well also.  Originally I learned how to use bind from this post:  http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=74321.  (His options #2 and #3 are best for what you want to do.  I happened to pick option #3 in case you're interested.)  In that post, the author states this about advantage of using bind vs. symlinks:

I should note that another way to accomplish all this is simply to create a symbolic link from one location to the next. However, I live in a very networked environment with a combination of Windows, Macs, and Linux machines so I use Samba and the Samba client cannot follow symbolic links without modifying config files which Samba does not recommend.

[m654321]

Many thanks gold_finger for this very helpful information.

You mentioned you used the 'binding method' for file sharing on a separate DATA partition. Is 'binding' more advantageous to 'symlinking'?  Though the latter appears to work for me, I might try the former now my confidence with Linux is growing... 

Is it easy to undo the symlinks, which I assume is necessary before proceeding with binding?

Regards
Mike

[gold_finger]

Glad you got it sorted out.

The problem I had appears to be due to be me incorrectly using 'Y' in response to being asked to upgrade to the maintainer's newer version, instead of using the correct default option of 'N'....

I recommend that, within the installation guide, or even as a banner on LL's website home page, the use of default option of  'N' should be very clearly highlighted.

Will look into possible better emphasis in Help Manual.

I have a question on the size for separate  /home/username  partitions for  LL & the other distro in a dual-boot set-up.

Also when I create the separate home partitions, should they be named  /home/username  or  /home/username/    (slash also after 'username')

Size?  2-5GB should be fine, but may vary depending on your exact setup and how you do things.  If you kept the "Desktop" folder in /home/username and you tend to temporarily save/put things on the desktop, keep that in mind as possible guide for the size of /home.  Eg. If you try to download a large 4GB ISO file to the Desktop (instead of Downloads folder on the Data partition), but only made /home 2GB -- the download will fail due to lack of space.

Naming?  You should not be creating the partition as "/home/username" -- partition should just have mount point of "/home".  (Trailing "/" makes no difference -- "/home" and "/home/" mean same thing.)  The system will put all users' home directories under /home automatically, giving you /home/username.  Eg.  If computer is used by two people -- "me" and "you" -- then directories "/home/me" and "/home/you" will be created in "/home" for each user.  (NOTE:  You may want to increase size of /home partition if you will have more than one user on the computer.)

[m654321]

Gold_finger, the good news is that sda & sdb are now working cooperatively, with the OS files spread out between the two physical drives. With your help, I appear to have solved the problem I mentioned about failure to boot-up, following the LL's OS files being shared between the two hard drives.

The problem I had appears to be due to be me incorrectly using 'Y' in response to being asked to upgrade to the maintainer's newer version, instead of using the correct default option of 'N'. It now explains a lot of the instability I have experienced generally, since I  came over to linux in  April 2014.

I recommend that, within the installation guide, or even as a banner on LL's website home page, the use of default option of  'N' should be very clearly highlighted. I wonder how many newbies to linux have been tripped up with this inadvertent error?  In the link you sent me about this issue, I thought very much the same way as the person in that forum posting who had this very same problem - I assumed (wrongly) that the maintainer's version was Valtam's Linux Lite - the idea of a throwback to Ubuntu never occurred to me.

I have a question on the size for separate  /home/username  partitions for  LL & the other distro in a dual-boot set-up. Since all my usual folders will be in the separate DATA partition, I will, as you pointed out, only need small /home/username partitions. I noticed the files in the separate home appeared to take up around 60-70 MB, following a fresh install, so I set the size for each of the separate home partitions at 250 MB.  This appeared too small, as subsequently some items were missing on panel bar following boot-up.  Another time I used 1.8 GB, and this seemed to be okay. Maybe I should go for 5GB for as a safe bet, as I assumeg the amount of space taken up by config files in /home will increase over time. I have 1TB for sdb, so space is not an issue here.  What do you think?

Also when I create the separate home partitions, should they be named  /home/username  or  /home/username/    (slash also after 'username')
I know you don't use separate  /home  partitions, but I have found that the response of LL appears to be noticeably crisper/snappier with them, so would quite like to continue with this as long as it continues to work (!).

[m654321]

Many thanks for your reply above - I will give this a go...

[gold_finger]

Sounds like something got changed by accident on the system.  If both HDDs work without problem when installing one OS in entirety to each, then would guess that nothing wrong with them.  Sounds like you have re-installed that way for now -- correct?  Before you changed to one OS per HDD, did you have problem booting into both OSs from grub menu or just into LL?

I can't think of any reason why booting and performance would get messed up simply by attaching a game wheel.

Do you remember if you performed any updates recently in LL 2.0?  If so, there may have been an update that asked you whether to replace a couple of config files with new versions or keep existing ones.  The right answer to that is to keep the existing configs.  Maybe you replaced them and that somehow caused the problem.  Here's a long post describing what I'm talking about:  https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/index.php?topic=632.0.

Have you tried re-installing with partitions spread over both drives again?

I'm really not sure what the problem is.  My setup is similar to yours except I don't use a /home partition.  I have root partitions and a data partition on one drive; swap and a couple of other partitions on another drive.  Below I've attached output showing my drives with mount points and also a copy of my fstab file.

Code: [Select]

bill@Gold:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 298.1G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0    25G  0 part
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part
├─sda3   8:3    0 223.1G  0 part /mnt/DATA
└─sda5   8:5    0    25G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0 596.2G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   0     9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sdb2   8:18   0   230G  0 part
├─sdb3   8:19   0     1K  0 part
├─sdb5   8:21   0    40G  0 part /mnt/ISOs
├─sdb6   8:22   0    40G  0 part
└─sdb7   8:23   0   200G  0 part /mnt/VBoxHDs
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom 
bill@Gold:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=a9222190-0805-47ef-a2e2-e98b19d84b54 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=c4933327-f314-42ee-8b4a-ec3e48a0ded5 none            swap    sw              0       0
# Mount DATA partition
UUID=ceee2524-7df2-4d21-a1f7-9e7e55c722cc /mnt/DATA ext4 defaults 0 2
# Mount ISOs partition
UUID=15443ba5-bdd0-4f0d-ae19-420022a7aab7 /mnt/ISOs ext4 defaults 0 0
# Mount VBoxHDs partition
UUID=3e68db3c-2acd-4718-812e-93e10bf63cf5 /mnt/VBoxHDs ext4 defaults 0 0
If you haven't tried re-doing the installs across both HDDs and have the time to do it, try again and make sure your fstab file ends up similar to mine (different UUIDs ofcourse).

If by chance you currently still have this setup

Code: [Select]

zorin9@zorin9-X71Q:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0   0  74.5G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0  37.3G  0 part /
└─sda2   8:2    0  37.3G  0 part
sdb      8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   0     1K  0 part
├─sdb2   8:18   0   9.5G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sdb5   8:21   0   922G  0 part /mnt/DATA
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom 
and can not boot into your installed LL, boot up with your live LL DVD.  Then open a terminal and post back output of following commands:

Code: [Select]

sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
cat /mnt/etc/issue
cat /mnt/etc/lsb-release
cat /mnt/etc/fstab
sudo umount /mnt
Maybe those will give a clue as to what's going wrong.

[m654321]

Gold_finger, many thanks for the above, which I will try in the next few days while I still have some vacation left...!
A more basic problem with my laptop has presented itself in the last couple of days. I'm unsure whether it's a hardware issue and whether it can be resolved using the terminal.

For some reason. that I'm unable to fathom, the internal drives sda and sdb are not working together in a coordinated way. I'll just clarify this. Earlier this month, to maximise efficiency of operation, I put the core part of the distro OS on sda, and the /home, /mnt/DATA, and swap on sdb.  It worked very well and I noticed, as you'd expect, a much crisper snappier response from the computer with open/closing files etc.  However, this doesn't happen any longer. The entirety of the OS has to be installed on either sda or sda - no sharing of parts of the OS between sda & sdb works any more as I just get a blank (black) screen on boot up (i.e. no grub screen appears) and it just stays like that with the cursor blinking indefinitely. Curiously, the laptop will run two distros separately, that is one installed entirely on sda, the other on sdb and will show both of these listed on the grub screen at boot up.

The only thing that has changed with my set-up was that I bought a USB games steering wheel for my young son so that he could play supertuxkart. A few days later (after he began playing with this) the laptop cut out one day and powered off. The 3A fuse in the plug had blown and was replaced. I also noticed flicker with the graphics after this at the beginning of a game but it disappeared once the game was underway.  At the time, with the steering wheel set-up, I was only using an OS installed entirely on sda.  However since then I have lost coordinated operation between sda and sdb as described in the first para above.  I don't know whether the two are linked and whether I can retrieve normal sda/sdb shared OS operation as before through the use of the terminal.

I'd be grateful for any views or ideas you might have on this. I'm hoping it is not time to fork out for a new laptop...

Kind regards
Mike