How to have both Gnome & KDE?

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1002richards

How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

Sorry but my searches have been fruitless 'cos my key words are too commonly used here. I'm sure the answer is already in here somewhere!!

I have a dual boot Mint 7 Gloria Gnome / Vista, on a laptop (1 drive).
Mint in one partition. Vista in C as usual.

Mint boot screen working fine in mbr

How can I add Mint 7 KDE my set up without trashing everything? I'd like to be able to choose between Gnome and KDE at boot - is that poss?

I've run the KDE DVD and it works as a live distro so where next please??

Please keep it simple 'cos I'm a linux newbie.

For instance I've seen instructions such as "navigate to the xyz directory" but how? So please take it step by step.

I can open the terminal and have done a couple of apt-get ... so hopefully I'm not beyond help???!!!

TIA

Richard
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
RichardH

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by RichardH »

There are at least two ways to accomplish what you wish:
1. If you have an empty partition of 8 to 20 GB, you could install Mint7Kde to that partition and
you will have the choice offered at boot up.
And you will have a complete Gnome install as well as a complete Kde install of Mint.
This is the best but it may not be possible depending on your partitioning scheme.

If no extra partition, then
2. Install Kde into your present Mint installation. This will not give you the complete install of both.
There are instructions already posted but they would need to be searched in the archives.
Probably you will end up with the Kde bootup screen instead of the original Mint7GloriaGnome one.
From this you will have to choose which Window manager at the bottom left, when you login, when you wish to change.

The best way is #1 but it may not be possible.

There are other things you could do to make it possible to switch between them without risk of losing data.
Though, using two different, though similar, distros on the same data always has more risk than only one.

Please post the contents of the files blkid.listing & fstab.listing
$ blkid >blkid.listing
$ cat /etc/fstab > fstab.listing

And let's see what is possible with the least hassle.
1002richards

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

Hi and thanks for your help.
With blkld I got command not found

With fstab I got no such file or directory.

Have I messed those up somehow? :oops:
lagagnon

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by lagagnon »

1002richards wrote:Hi and thanks for your help.
With blkld I got command not found

With fstab I got no such file or directory.

Have I messed those up somehow?
Yes you are not typing properly. That is "blkid" not "blkld" and "cat /etc/fstab", not "cat fstab".
1002richards

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

... I apologise ... my dog ate my excuse.
Will try again.

Here's what I got ... I did 'enter' at end each line. Logged in as root but tried sudo as well cos still nothing ...

richard@richard-laptop ~ $ blkid>blkid.listing
richard@richard-laptop ~ $ blkid>blkid.listing
richard@richard-laptop ~ $ sudo blkid>blkid.listing
richard@richard-laptop ~ $ sudo cat/etc/fstab > fstab.listing
sudo: cat/etc/fstab: command not found
richard@richard-laptop ~ $ sudo cat/etc/fstab>fstab.listing
sudo: cat/etc/fstab: command not found
richard@richard-laptop ~ $ cat/etc/fstab.listing
bash: cat/etc/fstab.listing: No such file or directory
richard@richard-laptop ~ $

I'm doing something very simple very wrong here aren't I !!!
1002richards

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

Is it that bad? :oops:
RichardH

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by RichardH »

Yeah, but you'll learn. :)

Please post the contents of the files blkid.listing & fstab.listing
$ blkid >blkid.listing
$ cat /etc/fstab >fstab.listing
These commands write info into a file that is probably here in
/home/richard/blkid.listing
/home/richard/fstab.listing

You have to type them exactly,
and the important part is the contents of the files: blkid.listing & fstab.listing
which contain the output of the above commands, so we can see what you have.

You need to open each file in nautilus, right click to edit, highlight all the text, copy it with Ctrl-C,
switch to the forum posting page and enter the text with Ctrl-V into your post.
Then the file structure and partitions will be visible to all.
The second tutorial is about using nautilus.

If this doesn't help enough, then please read through the following tutorials
in order to understand what we're asking:
This is a very good basic nuts and bolts sort. Everybody needs to learn enough to clunk along in a terminal.
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/
and this one about getting around in Nautilus:
http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/windowstolinux.shtml

Learning the file structure is a necessary part of using linux. Makes it easier to find things.
Everybody has to start somewhere and this is a good starting point.
1002richards

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

Ahhh the info went where you said:

here's the first:

/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="3030-3030" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sda3: UUID="C4D69C7DD69C7202" LABEL="OS" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="a824e746-ee23-4d13-9531-384dfe069a76" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda6: UUID="76117f5d-0d4e-4037-b49f-a3f5e79624ff" TYPE="swap"

Many thanks ... second to follow.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=a824e746-ee23-4d13-9531-384dfe069a76 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=76117f5d-0d4e-4037-b49f-a3f5e79624ff none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
RichardH

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by RichardH »

Very good.

Do you have a lot of data on this laptop?
What are the sizes of the different partitions?

Please post the contents of df.listing
$ df -h >df.listing

If you are still in the preparing to start stages and don't have much data,
it will be simpler to start again.

Could depend on how much space available.
If you're going to have two Mint installs to use they will need at least 8 GB each on separate partitions.

So lets see what's available.
1002richards

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

Many thanks for you help.
That report found its way to the same folder but was blank for some reason??!

Hopefully I've attached a screen shot of my 'C' drive.
Plenty of free space, but what about the number of partitions - is three the limit?

All docs, photos, etc saved on external drive.
Three OS restore discs with me if all goes pear-shaped.
RichardH

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by RichardH »

In order to have Mint with Gnome and Kde installed to this machine I would do the following
(my personal preference, there are other ways):

Preparation:
Remove /dev/sda3, /dev/sda6, /dev/sda5 (bakup anything needed: mail, bookmarks, etc.)
[In that order.]

Create logical partitions:
/dev/sda5 15 GB ext3 ;; to install Mint7Gnome
/dev/sda6 2 GB swap ;; for everybody
/dev/sda7 15 GB ext3 ;; to install Mint7Kde
/dev/sda8 20 GB ext3 ;; mount on /datb for binary data for Mint: tbird.default, firefox.default, archives, etc.
The stuff you want available in both linux installs. Also makes it easier to reinstall. I'll explain about tbird & firefox if you're interested.

Create a primary, /dev/sda3, or another logical partition /dev/sda9:
/dev/sdaX use all the rest GB or size as desired ntfs ;; your choice for common data.
fat32 is simpler; haven't used ntfs for writing.
The installer will let you mount this at boot time as well. Use as ntfs, etc.

The limit to partitions is 15 as I remember: either 4 primary partitions;
or 3 primaries + 1 extended and 11 logical partitions, but I could be wrong.
Used to be more a few years back, but this is usually sufficient. There are ways if you really need them.

The minimum size for a linux installation partition is about 5 GB but you'll run out of room soon. 15 to 20 GB is good for installing the operating system. You keep /home in the / partition and keep all your data on separate partitions. Then when re/installing you don't need to worry about your data getting wiped, only the configs in /home/richard. Sharing /home between various distros tends to be problematic even the various Mints. Could be done, but I've had fewer problems since I quit trying to share /home.


Install:
1. Install Mint7Gloria Kde4 on sda7, using swap, mount sda5 on /mintg and sda8 mounted on /datb
2. Install Mint7Gloria Gnome on sda5, using swap, mount sda7 on /mintk and sda8 mounted on /datb

You can name the mount points in the installer, mark it to be utilized and mounted.

I suggest installing the Kde version first so that the Gnome version will be the version on the MBR,
but that's a personal choice, you can change the order if you wish.

And then you will have a choice of either Gnome, Kde or Windows at boot time.
Hope this works for you.

saludos,
Richard.
Last edited by RichardH on Sun Aug 16, 2009 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
1002richards

Re: How to have both Gnome & KDE?

Post by 1002richards »

Many thanks for your help & advice, really appreciated.
I'll start on this when I get back from work & will post back if I run into problems.

Cheers.
Richard.
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