Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 17:53:14 -0500 (EST) From: James da Silva <jds@torrentnet.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Error installing pine-3.96 Message-ID: <199703312253.RAA25744@bacardi.torrentnet.com> In-Reply-To: <12424.859846640@time.cdrom.com>
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In article <12424.859846640@time.cdrom.com> Jordan writes: >> We already take into consideration the possibility of a person having a >> pc with multiple os's on it. Why can't we consider the option of having >> one pc with multiple versions of fbsd on it? One of the excuses for not > >It's too hard? :-) > >For one thing, you can't give it its own partition since only the >first 0xA5 type partition is booted from and I can't really imagine >how you'd make multiple versions co-exist in a single partition. There are two "hacky" ways to do this relatively easily that I've implemented in past lives: 1. A simple utility reads/writes the partition table, setting the desired partition to 0xA5, and any other 0xA5 partitions to, eg, 0xA6. Thus you run something: # active-bsd 1 # reboot To make partition 1 the "active" (eg 0xa5) bsd partition and boot into it. 2. Modify the kernel bootup sequence to check for a directory under the root matching a desired string, eg, "freebsd-<version>", and chroot to that before doing anything else. Inside that directory you play hard link and symlink games to get a different, version specific, view of the world. I wouldn't recommend either of these methods for inclusion in FreeBSD, but for a clueful developer wanting to mess around with different *BSD versions, these aren't too painful to implement for personal use. Jaime ........................................................................... : James da Silva <jds@torrentnet.com> : Stand on my shoulders, : : Torrent Networking Technologies Corp. : not on my toes. :
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