topic title: Distri display in multiboot
Posts: 325
male
Joined: 04 Nov 2011
#1
fatmac wrote:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual"
linktext was:"http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual"
====================================
... l#Features
(see 5.3 Multi-boot manual config)
post39615.html?hilit=#p39615

Well, I've been looking too long after that.
There are several possibilities.
The easiest way I find this
in a multiboot system with Grub2 and os-prober

The example antiX
check

Code: Select all

apt-cache policy lsb-release
lsb-release:
  Installiert:           4.1+Debian13+nmu1
  Installationskandidat: 4.1+Debian13+nmu1
  Versionstabelle:
 *** 4.1+Debian13+nmu1 0
        500 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ testing/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
and the presence of the file (/)etc/lsb-release
if so, rename it to .old


create a New (/)etc/lsb-release
with this content

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DISTRIB_ID=antiX
DISTRIB_RELEASE=14
DISTRIB_CODENAME=Killah P
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="antiX 14"

Code: Select all

update-grub
os-prober reads this line

Code: Select all

DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="antiX 14"
and after the reboot you will see them in their Grub menu multi-boot system. __{{emoticon}}__
Posts: 604
thriftee
Joined: 27 Feb 2009
#2
Thats amazing!

But why isnt that in the grub manual or used by the distros?

It boggles the mind!
anticapitalista
Posts: 5,955
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
#3
thriftee wrote:Thats amazing!

But why isnt that in the grub manual or used by the distros?

It boggles the mind!
It is in the a14/15 series. 13.2 used grub-legacy.
Posts: 325
male
Joined: 04 Nov 2011
#4
@thriftee

this also works with 11; 13.1; 13.2 etc.
(here is the name of the file os-release > .old)

the primary boot loader must be grub2
Posts: 604
thriftee
Joined: 27 Feb 2009
#5
Well, myself, having 10 or 12 distros on each drive has not been unusual, and grub-legacy and grub4dos and lilo left me"up the creek without a paddle" too many times, so I've made a rule that any OS that grub2 doesn't work on either doesn't get loaded at all, or certainly is not intentionally permitted to update the MBR or control the boot, having made that mistake so many times before, and non-conforming distros only get loaded to old junker disk drives so they can't screw me too badly.

So, having many"unknown linux distributions" the past year, that get regenerated as"unknown" everytime I install another, I finally resorted to putting in / etc/slackware-version files for them to try to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that the grub menus would at least have SOME indication of what OS was going to boot. If someone had put the lsb stuff into the documentation, even s simply as your post, I might have"done it right", or better yet not needed to because it would have already been there if it had been common knowledge of how grub would decide what to put in its menu text.

Anyway, your / etc/lsb-release file is nothing short of a revelation for me, and it makes zero sense to me why the devs of these systems couldn't have taken a few minutes to add one to their distros.

And then you having given me a search string, I went and looked and found this... IMO, they shouldn't have skipped them and instead put in the error message so people would ask to have it fixed, and if that had been the case, I wouldn't have these messes on my drives today... Look at the date...

os-prober (0.14) unstable; urgency=low
* Joey Hess
- It's actually allowed and common for / etc/lsb-release to not include a
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION or DISTRIB_CODENAME, so don't call such distros
"Unknown semi-LSB-compliant Linux distribution", just skip to the next
test. This affected FC2.
-- Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> Fri, 27 Aug 2004 12:57:06 -0400