Grub issues...sharing with Mint. Please help

[alquimista]

Hi,

I have 3 partitions, each having 50Gb. 2 of them have Linux Mint (13 and 12), being Mint 12 my main working distro. Yesterday I installed Mageia 2 to review it in one of the partitions (sda7). In the setup process, I specified that in sda5, and entry should be created in the Grub menu for Mint 12. The old grub menu created by Mint and used well to select OSs, was replaced then.
After rebooting, Mageia could start up ok; when trying to boot selecting Mint 12, I got an error related to the impossibility to execute it. I compared grub.cfg in Mint, and menu.lst of Mageia grub, and commands are different; I tryed, copying the "boot" parameter in grub.cfg, to menu.lst line related to Mint... and didn't work either.

I'd appreciate your help please, since I urgently need to access my Mint 12 partition

Thank you,

[tom_]

probably your problem is due to the fact that Mageia use the old version of GRUB,
Mint uses GRUB2.

I don't think it is possible to have both the evrsion of GRUB at the same time..

if you need to back to mint you should boot with a mint live CD
and then reinstall grub2

[macxi]

Hi Alquimista,

Welcome to the Mageia Forum!

Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, so you can check if the Errata of Mageia 2 help you in this issue:

In Mageia 2 Errata: Installing Mageia next to a GRUB2 based distribution

Installing Mageia next to a GRUB2 based distro (like Debian or Ubuntu) is not supported. With the default GRUB settings you won't be able to boot into your GRUB2 based distro anymore. To manually add a GRUB2 based system to your Mageia boot menu you may wish to follow the steps here: Adding a GRUB2 based system manually.

Or you can try Reinstall grub2 from LiveCD

[gohlip]

you can boot mint from Mageia's grub by chainloading too as well as directly.
chain loader +1
or
kernel (hd0,x)/boot/grub/core.img


just don't forget (hd0,x) in Mageia grub is different from mints grub

[alquimista]

Hello,

Thank you all for your help

I used the Mint LiveCD to recover the original Mint Grub menu; now I can access to my main distro that is Mint 12

Anyway I tested Mageiia 2 for a little while; my hardware is Intel motherboard with Dual Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram, 2 HDs: 150Gb, 300Gb, gForce NVidia video card

Before installing on a HD partition, on the Mint 12 VirtualBox, Mageia worked fine

Once I installed on the HD partition, I had several issues:
- Wireless didn't work
- Different video formats of my movies, didn't work: either the file could not played it at all, or no sound
- Video player hanged
- I could not configure the task bar, so I could see different tasks of the same app, displayed on the bar
- Some applications (like Libre Office, Network Manager) took so long to load
- In the data partition (ext4, 300 Gb HD), I could see directories from "/" using Dolphin, yet I could not access in them

What I liked:
- Polished interface
- Good fonts
- Friendly instalation
- Good documentation
- Friendly and responsive forum

[doktor5000]

If you want those issue to be solved, please open separate threads for each issue. Apart from that, seems you're missing either nonfree and/or tainted repositories
(for wireless firmware/driver and audio/video codecs and so on) so you may want to look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Software_management

[macxi]

Hi Alquimista,
There is always someone available to try to help you configure your Mageia.
You listed problems that seem simple. Maybe it can be resolved quickly, but it would be interesting if you give more details, to seek to resolve them.

Are you using KDE or Gnome?

- Wireless didn't work

In most cases it is easy to configure wireless, as Doktor500 said.

- Different video formats of my movies, didn't work: either the file could not played it at all, or no sound
- Video player hanged

Set you the media properly? (see here and here) After that, install Mplayer and VLC software.

- I could not configure the task bar, so I could see different tasks of the same app, displayed on the bar

The widgets were unblocked?

- Some applications (like Libre Office, Network Manager) took so long to load

Nepomuk was disabled?

- In the data partition (ext4, 300 Gb HD), I could see directories from "/" using Dolphin, yet I could not access in them

There are folders systems that can be seen but not accessed. That depends on the permissions. These permissions can be changed. It is not clear to me what the problem is.

[filip]

- In the data partition (ext4, 300 Gb HD), I could see directories from "/" using Dolphin, yet I could not access in them

There are folders systems that can be seen but not accessed. That depends on the permissions. These permissions can be changed. It is not clear to me what the problem is.

It might be result of different UID. Mageia use UID 500 by default. I think many others use 1000. In multiboot enviroment user must have same UID if files are shared. That can be achieved easily when creating users in Mageia install by clicking "Advanced" (IIRC) button there and setting the same UID and GUID as other instaled distro.

[wpost]

It might be result of different UID. Mageia use UID 500 by default. I think many others use 1000. In multiboot enviroment user must have same UID if files are shared. That can be achieved easily when creating users in Mageia install by clicking "Advanced" (IIRC) button there and setting the same UID and GUID as other instaled distro.

I can confirm that Linux Mint Debian Edition begins numbering UIDs at 1000 by default. This caused me a little trouble when I moved from Mandriva 2010.2 (UID 500+) to Mint. And now that I'm moving from Mint to Mageia, I get to do it all over again.

The original poster might want to consult my notes on how I resolved this:

http://my.opera.com/wpost/blog/uid-mismatch

[doktor5000]

You can just create the user and choose the UID manually, so it would be the same as currently in Mint, this can also be done in the installer: http://doc.mageia.org/installer/2/en/co ... erAdvanced