Limited Inclusion of antiX-26_386 in a chainlist on a multi-partition system

[Len E.Member]

It has been widely-reported with early releases of antiX-26 that it won’t
chainload on a multi-partition system.

With earlier versions of antiX, I’ve usually installed them on a multi-partition
system and specified locating GRUB in the PBR. I’ve had a Ubuntu-based
system as the Host OS installed to the MBR, or more often, configured with
a separate /boot partition and used SuperGRUB or Plop to invoke it, in order
to run sudo update-grub to build the chainlist and provide access to antiX.

I’ve encountered the previously-reported problem with antiX-26_386 also,
with my regular Ubuntu-based Host OS’s, Zorin 17.3, Xubuntu-22.04.5 and
Bodhi 7.0.0.

However, I found that with MX-23.6-fluxbox_386 installed to the MBR on
my Acer Aspire 1 D250-1428 Netbook, a 32-bit machine, and
with MX-23.6-fluxbox_x64 installed with a /boot partition on my
HP DC5700 desktop, a 64-bit machine, the OS Prober software successfully
located the antiX-26_386 partition and included it in their chainlists.

Given the level of collaboration between the antiX and MX development
teams, I wonder if there is something different with OS-Prober on MX
versus the Ubuntu-based version which explains the difference in behaviour.

Len E.

[vitforlinuxMember]

Some distros have os-prober disabled by default but just enable it and multi-boot works.

MX has os-prober enabled by default.

the simplest method to activate os-prober in a distro that has not activated it and check if os-prober is installed, and if it is not install it.

Then look in /etc/default/grub for the line

#GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

and replace with

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

then update grub

sudo update-grub

Sorry for my spaghetti english, i'm italian. Happy XORG user. GNOME? No thanks!

[Len E.Member]

Hi vitforlinux:

All the distros mentioned have os-prober installed and
the statement GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false in place
in /etc/default/grub.

The Ubuntu-based Host OS’s had no problem finding
antiX-23.2, so the mystery is why the difficultly
with antiX-26_386 ??

Len E.

[Len E.Member]

An AI-generated comment on the web indicates that a Ubuntu-based
Host OS needs the antiX-26 partition mounted to be able to find it when
running sudo update-grub and including it in the chainlist.

When trying this, os-prober finds the antiX-26 partition but generates an
error: /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error unknown filesystem .
However, antiX-26 is included in the chainlist.

When invoking antiX-26 from the chainlist, a message
error: /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.240-antix.1-486-smp not found
appears.

*************************************************
antiX-26 can be started directly using Super Grub to access the
PBR. The “not found” file in the error message above is in
place, and obviously works o.k. for the Super Grub access to
succeed.

It is not clear why the Ubuntu-based os-prober can’t read the
“not found” file.

Len E.

[sybokMember]

When I checked Xubuntu (and Ubuntu) 22.04 download page, I found only 64-bit images; hence I assume that it is a 64-bit capable machine (unless you upgraded from previous versions)
Why install antiX 386 architecture on that device?
Did you use ext4 filesystem?
Is one an UEFI install while the other not?

Ubuntu-based Host OS needs the antiX-26 partition mounted

If that is true, what an example of ensh1tt1f1cat1on it is; I would assume that partition being marked with an appropriate flag (readable even when not mounted) would suffice.

[anti-apXosMember]

sybok wrote:

If that is true, what an example of ensh1tt1f1cat1on it is; I would assume that partition being marked with an appropriate flag (readable even when not mounted) would suffice.

The way os-prober works, partitions need to be mounted in order to identify an OS on them. On antix and other distros where I’ve tried it, os-prober will just try to temporarily mount every partition on the system. To me that seemes like a bad idea, so I never use os-prober. If Ubuntu’s version of os-prober doesn’t automatically mount unmounted partitions, I’d consider that an improvement, personally.

Even aside from this issue about mounting, I’ve found os-prober pretty unreliable. I always prefer to just add an entry manually using /etc/grub.d/40_custom

Really, though, the whole grub-mkconfig system seems unnecessarily complicated to me and in most cases it’s easier to just maintain a simple grub.cfg file myself.

"--"

[sybokMember]

@anti-apxos: OK, thank for the clarification about (temporarily) mounting the partition; if it is done with read-only, no problem with that.

This might explain the error about unknown file-system – Ubuntu tried to mount it (in that case I apologise to it) and failed with the error message (which is the part that somehow sucks).

[sybokMember]

@len-e: What happens when you try to mount the partition manually from Ubuntu?
Please post the output of the following command
mkdir ~/mounting; sudo mount --verbose --read-only -- /dev/sdxN ~/mounting/ && sudo umount ~/mounting
which mounts + umounts an example ‘/dev/sdxN’ partition to a folder ‘~/mounting’ (created for convenience) but you can use any other existing mountpoint you prefer.
Replace ‘/dev/sdxN’ by the actual partition where antiX (root) is installed.

Also, assuming you have ext4 filesystem, you could consider health-check (package ‘smartmontools’, utility|command ‘smartctl’) of the drive where antiX is installed.

[Len E.Member]

There has been some suggestions in web articles that chainlink problems
could be caused by subtle revisions to the ext4 file system in newer
distribution releases.

Given the release/availability of Zorin 18.1 lite on April 15/26, which is based
on Ubuntu 24.04, I installed it as a test Host OS on my HP Prodesk 400 G1
machine, and found that running sudo update-grub does find antiX-386 installed
on the machine, includes it in the chainlist, and will invoke it successfully.

Sparky Linux 8.4 reintroduced 32-bit support for x86 machines on its Debian 13
base with Sparky-Linux-minimalgui-386 featuring an Openbox DE on
August 11/26. I found that its chainlist behaviour is the same as that of
antiX-26_386; it works for Zorin 18.1 lite, doesn’t for older
Ubuntu-22.04-based Host OS’s.

Len E.

[Author]

Posts