[CentOS] installing C7 on a laptop with Win7, dual boot

Mon Mar 2 04:41:06 UTC 2015
Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>

>
> Unfortunately, when I did it, I got this:
> Generating grub configuration file ...
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64
> Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64.img
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7.x86_64
> Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7.x86_64.img
> Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-c875112952114f6284f69abaa4f9a2f7
> Found initrd image:
> /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-c875112952114f6284f69abaa4f9a2f7.img
> done
> No mention of the windows installation.


No mention of the Fedora installation either. So how are you going to boot
Fedora 19?

Honestly this is one of those things that convinces me we're in the 5th
epoch of computing dark age insanity. Windows n and Windows n+1; OS X n and
OS X n + 1 are bullet proof dual booting and never involved the user in
this sort of madness. On Linux, it's like, we step on our own tails, we
step on every distro's tails, we make this completely crazy complex and
things don't work (automatically).

What *I* would do >> I would use the Fedora GRUB instance as primary. And I
would have its 40_custom include the proper lines for Windows 7, and an
additional entry in 40_custom for CentOS using the configfile command to
point to the CentOS grub.cfg.

That way you have a single GRUB menu that always has up-to-date kernels.
The kernel updater only updates the distro specific  grub.cfg, so using
configfile to point to other distros is the correct way grub2-mkconfig
should be creating "master" grub.cfgs in the first place. But no, we are
living in the Pleistocene where things have to be made more difficult than
necessary.

Of course you could use CentOS as primary, modify its 40_custom to have the
Windows chainloader and Fedora configfile forwarding entries. Thing is, you
want the newest GRUB binaries to be primary and usually that's Fedora. In
your case with CentOS 7 and Fedora 19 it's probably a draw. But as Fedora
19 is EOL, you probably want to fedup that system to Fedora 21 one of these
days :-D.


Chris Murphy