SuperSluggo, is a quadcore DIY computer based on last year’s Linux Journal‘s Ultimate Linux Box. By waiting almost a year, the price came down to about $1500, even with souping up the system beyond what was described in the original article (1.5 terabytes of hard drive, anyone?). I set up a dual boot system with OpenSuse 10.3 and Windows Vista SP1 (Ok, the latter just for games). Since this is a non-trivial task, I kept a journal of what I did, and, in abbreviated form, I will reproduce the steps here. I hope this will be useful to someone else.
DUAL BOOT
Following age old wisdom, I install Windows before Linux. Windows likes to overwrite the MBR (master boot record), destroying what grub has written there, because Windows is pushy and doesn’t like the fact that you don’t like it and want something else on your hard drive besides it. I have 3 500 GB hard drives (almost enough space to download the whole internet) and I installed Vista on the first drive. I then inserted the OpenSuse 10.3 DVD (64 bit version) that I downloaded and used the installer to create partitions on the 2 other drives. I have done this before on my laptop with Windows XP, and I expected it to work fine. The OpenSuse installation went fine.
I then rebooted. Vista would not load. Apparently there is a problem with Vista and dual-booting. Vista checks the MBR or something. This problem did not exist with Windows XP. Vista — COMPUTER-HOG!
Well, after the usual googling, I found that I had to change the original entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst that OpenSuse had created on setup from (if I remember correctly)
root(hd1,1)
chainloader(hd0,0)+1
to
rootnoverify(hd0,0)
chainloader+1
And it worked!
Next: Nvidia driver installation.
