Hi everyone. As the title suggests, I have an old laptop dating back to 2009: an Acer 6293 with core 2 duo P8400, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SATA II SSD. I have TW and Leap 15.6 installed in dual boot. Both with XFCE.
Individually the systems are fine. My old laptop is as fast and responsive as new (Windows Vista).
In the bootloader I set it to boot in TW. It happens to me that after a kernel update in TW the previous kernel is always present when rebooting. I reinstalled the 2 systems completely yesterday and today with the new kernel… same problem.
I admit that I am an amateur. Should I give up on dual boot?
I would like to learn more about how I partitioned the disk. Despite its age the table of partition is GPT with 5 partitions. sda1 and unformatted bios_grub, sda2 512Mb EFI, sda3 btrfs for /TW, sda4 btrfs for Leap 15.6 and finally sda5 for swap. Is there any step I’m missing?
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
What does it mean?
I am sorry, but you should present facts, not your interpretation of these facts. Photo of the screen with explanation which line is incorrect and why in this case would be much better than vague tales.
I do not know what “and” in this sentence stays for, but BIOS_grub partition and EFI System Partition make no sense together. You either boot using legacy BIOS or you boot using UEFI.
Likely the step(s) required to prevent each OS from presuming it’s the sole openSUSE installation. 
If UEFI, the simplest solution may lie in file /etc/default/grub. By default, GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= in it is blank. Because of this, in a UEFI boot environment, both Leap and TW will assume ownership of /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse/, thus overwriting each other at every opportunity if there is only one ESP partition. If you assign a string value to GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=, e.g. “leap156”, then that installation will cease using /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse, and instead use /boot/efi/EFI/leap156, when next any transaction occurs to update, rewrite or reinstall grub for that “customized” installation.
An alternative that doesn’t differ whether in legacy/BIOS mode or UEFI mode, is to uninstall the bootloader from one or the other. Only one bootloader, and only one ESP, is required for booting a mere two installed GNU/Linux OSes (same as with more than two). Either openSUSE Grub will boot the other, as long as os-prober is installed and enabled. Given that in TW is always newer, it’s the one I always use for UEFI.
For legacy/BIOS PCs, I’m still using the Grub v0.97-194 that came with openSUSE 13.1, for upwards of 40 OS installations on 2 or 3 PCs, and more than 20 on most others.
@mrmazda
HI. thanks for the advices. Considering my inexperience, perhaps it is appropriate to give up one of the 2 OS. Thank you
Which is exactly the problem OP has (as OP prefers that we apply our imagination to guess the problem). Because boot options in the primary system which owns the bootloader are not updated when kernels are added/removed in the secondary system.
The way multiboot was implemented with os-prober is broken by definition.
If you mean keeping only Leap or TW and removing or ignoring the other, there is no good reason I can think of to do it. You got them installed. Now learn what it takes to use them both. It’s not hard. Simply discontinue using Leap for a few days once you have TW booting reliably. After a newer release version than yours has been announced, so it’s time to do a zypper dup, first give GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= a unique value, such as “opensusetw”, then do your dup. Once you’re settled that all is good in TW, use its menu to boot Leap, then use zypper or yast to remove grub* and os-prober before doing anything else. From then on, you’ll need have no worries about one damaging the other, or one not being bootable. No Linux-only PC needs more than one bootloader.
PS: all the above presumes TW was installed to use Grub2 as bootloader, the historical normal, and given your description of partitioning, the virtually certain state of your system. An alternative is either already available, or will be before long. If your TW installation includes the rpm systemd-boot, a different plan may be needed.
It’s readily worked around by using custom stanzas that rely on the kernel and initrd symlinks that some distros, such as openSUSE, create by default.
@mrmazda
HI. Thanks for your interest. So I should remove grub and os-probe. It’s correct?
A thousand thanks
What is correct is what I wrote, grub* and os-prober, meaning the os-prober rpm, and the several rpms whose names begin with “grub”. Removing them may trigger removal of other packages, such as gfxboot, perl-Bootloader, yast2-bootloader and possibly others that will not be required with grub2 not installed.
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@mrmazda
Thank you very much
@arvidjaar HI. Sorry but with my smartphone (too small for my age) I hadn’t seen your post. I brought this configuration with me from Fedora 38. Today after doing a new installation I followed the partitioning suggested by YAST. So now I only have Leap 15.6 xfce with 8mb unformatted bios-grub sda1, /sda2 with 120gb btrfs and sda3 swap. I will decide soon whether to add TW… Thanks for your contribution. Greetings
With the previous configuration, removing grub and os-prober from Leap made this OS unusable.
It doesn’t have much to do with experience, but with needs. You have to reflect about why you decided to have more than one OS installed beforehand. There are people with decades of experience that runs only one OS.
Further, you have to think why choose Tumbleweed?
@heitormoreira
The most important system is Leap 15.6!! I installed the TW just to continue gaining experience with a more demanding system…
Stick with Leap and try Tumbleweed in a virtual machine, if you wish.
@heitormoreira HI. I use Leap 15.6 in bare metal. in vm I use 3 other Leap 15.6 KDE and XFCE 2 TW KDE and XFCE and 1 slowroll XFCE. Besides openSUSE I have 1 linux Mint xfce and mx linux xfce… I really like openSUSE :)
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