Although this thread shows a number of helpful comments I am still unclear about the best course of action and am hoping to define the alternatives better as a result of this post.
The subject is: Adding an Entry to the oSUSE Bootloader. I also wanted to to eliminate the listings for some of the OS’s I no longer use.
Apparently, Yast’s Bootloader Utility can not be used to resolve these issues (add some &/or subtract other OS’s from the boot menu). And as I now understand it, grub2 generates a new list every time it boots.
So maybe what I need to do is eliminate the partitions on which these unused (or seldom used) OS’s are located.
Otherwise, what can be done must occur via a terminal (as I understood the comments kindly provided).
I am also considering the realization of more radical changes. To date, I have been installing my Linux distros on logical partitions within an extended partition and have considered btrfs as an experimental file system and format that offers some benefits, but not as being something that is fundamentally different.
That may be incorrect. For example: Someone on the forum of the OS I installed without a bootloader (Fedora 20 Gnome 62bit - Fedora is an OS I have never installed), recommended dedicating an entire disk to btrfs, which made some sense because I recently tried to install Debian kFreeBSD (but was unable to complete the installation, presumably due to a problem with my NVidia card). IAC, the k stands for kernel and the file system is ZFS, which (AIUI), shares various goals and attributes with btrfs.
And during the installation, ZFS takes over to do whatever it does. (Whether that is good or bad is another matter - time will tell - if it works, that’s good. If it breaks, not so much).
In short: I am thinking about transferring the two systems I’ve been using (openSUSE and a Debian derivative) to a disk used previously for backups, along with this new installation, which would be the first on that disk.
The question is, how difficult would it be for me to clone my openSUSE installation to the other drive, afterwords? (This was originally an 11.3 net installation that was successfully upgraded to 13.1 via zypper dup, following instructions. My Debian Testing derivative broke recently and oSUSE is performing better than ever. (I have formed no opinion about Fedora, since I have never installed it - just Funduntu, once which was highly configurable -like oSUSE- but was KDE, which is not what I prefer - it’s fine but I have found it to be is a bit fancy and slower than Gnome and Mate, which I am more familiar with). The Fedora folks on the forum are very helpful, with some from RedHat intervening (as do SUSE Enterprise persons here)?
As things stand, I want move ahead on this carefully and protect my oSUSE installation. (The Debian derivative now requires log in as Root and that prevents me from using the data it saves in other OS’s, unless I change the Permissions, from there). So oSUSE is my main installation, at present. V. 13.1 doesn’t slow down as previous versions did after a couple of days without rebooting - so far.
Do oSUSE veterans share the opinion that brtfs is best implemented as a full disk installation? Are the benefits worth it? And would I be able to install other OS’s on that same disk?
I assume that an extended partition can not be used. Is that correct? (My openSUSE has two btrfs partitions within an extended partition at present, so maybe it isn’t - but we may be talking about a different implementation of btrfs). I was hoping to get this resolved today, but that may not be possible.
TIA