Installing Solus to Dual Boot with Ultrmarine Linux.

Frank-Starr

I have Ultramarine Linux installed on one of my laptops. I'd like to install Solus to dual boot with it, but I'm thinking there may be compatibility issues making it impossible.
My main hesitation is when I look at the Ultramarine installation with GPARTED. It shows as follows:

Partition: File System Size Mount Point Label Size Used Unused Flags
SDA1 Grub2 core.img 1 MB 1MB bios_grub
SDA2 ext4 /boot 1GiB 437.62 MB 586.38 MB
SDA3 btrfs /,/home ul_localhost-live 930.51Gib 6.08Gib 924.43 GiB

Considering the btrfs formatting makes me wonder. Does the Solus installer just have an "install alongside" option which will handle all of this automtically? I was thinking of making a separate /home partition to be used by both Ultramarine and Solus, but with that btrfs formatting, I'm wondering if that's possible.

TIA,
Frank

brent

Frank-Starr good luck. when this ever gets solved I will consider it un milagro.

I have Solus and I have Fedora. I have to keep them apart because I can't install them together. Solus first, Fedora second=fedora erases solus bootloader
fedora first, solus second=fedora erases solus bootloader.
Grub wins every battle but I'm not a grub pro.
With Fedora 38 (which Ultra should be updated but its only a week old) there is a mythical, magical EFI bootloader in the install that forsakes Grub...a new Fedora invention...so it will create a true /boot efi that can be shared with Solus...if Solus was there first. I have been too inept to use it since documentation gets so dodgy.
As fars the BRTFS I don't know.
As far as the shared /home I really doubt it but I will defer.

As long as you have the 1 MB bios boot img there, it won't share with Solus. You can install Solus ("alongside" but I usually create partitions) but as long as your sys thinks you are in BIOS/Legacy the solus bootloader won't have chance. Oh sure. sda2 will be the efi boot but its symbiotic (I think) with the sda1 boot.

I have read hours and hours about this and there are many success stories side by side but I could not make it happen.

If you take anything from my failure-ridden reply is I did not try Alongside of yet. The truth is you can successfully install them next to each other but only one will ever boot for me. Everything I read is about installing Fedora as UEFI, not legacy, first and go from there. I can't do that. I have a freaky "Legacy and UEFI" bios with doesn't really mean it with the UEFI. It's just kidding. you can boot legacy or legacy+uefi. Not uefi.
If you can make the boots work you will be in business. If I had a different MOBO this would be solved for me.

Another downside if the solus boot gets borked: programs like Refind and GrubRescue are basically useless for Solus because its boot isn't grub.
--Still I'd go forward with the install of solus 'alongside' and go from there. but you look like you have no ext/root space to spare (586MB?) and you have a ton of /home space you can shrink. I don't know how solus installer handles that. I'm sure it will see all that /home space and carve out a home there (maybe?)
Sorry for the mess hopefully you can find value somewhere here

atriaze

Frank-Starr Seems to me there was a history of not selecting the boot partition when installing the second environment. Maybe look at this link.

[https://github.com/kyrios123/solus-efi-guide#efi-bootmanager](https://)

brent

brent much of what I said presupposes (how about that for a pretentious word?) that the Ultramarine architecture now rests on 38

Frank-Starr

brent wow! I think I'll go ahead and just go with Solus on my main laptop. After I get the keyboard repaired or replaced on my older one, maybe I'll put ultramarine there.
One thing ultramarine has that I would like to see incorporated into Solus: ultramarine seems to copy video files quite rapidly. Files from 300 meg to one gig all seem to copy from my SSD drive to a USB stick in one minute or less. Last time I used Solus it would take an average of three minutes. And this was the same copy function, from my SSD to a USB stick.

nolan

well, solus has that problem, it may be problematic to dualboot with solus but not imposible, I won't recommend doing it in the same drive though.

brent

nolan when I had solus installed first, I successfully bare metal installed other grub distros for a successful side by side boot. and another time when the grub distro was installed first, then solus and another successful dual boot. So Solus was fine.
that good luck streak ended when I met fedora.
i agree with you seperate disks is best

brent

fine print here:

" There are no separate media provided for BIOS and UEFI systems; all of them can boot from the same ISO image. However, once you install Fedora, you cannot switch between UEFI and BIOS. The system must run on the same firmware it was installed on; if you, for example, perform the installation on an UEFI system in UEFI mode, and then switch it to BIOS compatibility mode, Fedora will no longer boot and will require a reinstallation."

in a rare, Haley's Comet display of helpfulness, Fedora precedes this info with:

but when I click on that lhink it takes you to a page that has nothing to do with this install page.

Snark aside all I think their warning there is valid. You installed Ultramarine in bios from what I see.

EDIT/your key is a new Ultramarine install, and hoping you can master or implelement their brand new uefi install component of the Anaconda installer. Assuming Ultramarine install is 38 as well. then solus and ultramarine, in theory, will be friends on the same disk

100jan

Solus, (dual boot with Windows)
After installing Windows I create a second EFI partition, (about 300MB or 500MB) for Solus, and during the Solus installation I select that second EFI partition for GRUB. After installing Solus, I open both EFI partitions, and then copy the "Microsoft" folder from the EFI folder of the Windows EFI partition to the "EFI" folder in the EFI partition for Solus. After that, I open the terminal and run "sudo clr-boot-manager set-timeout 5 && sudo clr-boot-manager update" - enter and reboot. You can change the "set-timeout" value. I have a "set-timeout" of 5 seconds because that's enough for me. In the BIOS, Solus is recognized as "UEFI OS on ...partition.
Maybe this will help!?

[deleted]

If you've already installed Ultramarine, I'd install Solus on another drive with the Ultramarine one unplugged and let them have their own boot partitions. Then I'd just use the UEFI boot menu to select which OS to boot.

brent

Frank-Starr One thing ultramarine has that I would like to see incorporated into Solus: ultramarine seems to copy video files quite rapidly. Files from 300 meg to one gig all seem to copy from my SSD drive to a USB stick in one minute or less. Last time I used Solus it would take an average of three minutes. And this was the same copy function, from my SSD to a USB stick.

Grsync may or may not make the ultramarine time neglible. If you are talking one 500MB mp4 at a time then many times, you are correct, that little 'circle copy timer' in the file manager task bar takes a long while to make a rotation...to me importing any file the hdd is faster than exporting any file to a usb or external.

You made the right choice to seperate them. fedora (ultra) is a nifty little distro. @nolan said it was "problematic but not impossible" and he's right it all depends on confidence and time. to make them work together would likely take me most of a day (10 hours or so I reckon) if I could do it at all.
edit/typo farm