I recently downloaded OpenSUSE 12.2 and Mageia 2 and installed them on my computer. Initially I installed the OpenSUSE bootloader on the MBR. It was able to boot OpenSUSE and Windows but not Mageia. I used my Mageia disc to change the bootloader on the MBR to Mageia. When I did that it was able to boot Mageia and Windows but not OpenSUSE. Deciding that the installation process for OpenSUSE was kind of a nuisance, I dumped it in favor of Mageia, then downloaded and installed Fedora 17. I’ve never understood why when installing OpenSUSE, I have to install part of it, reboot, then finish the installlation. Mageia goes through the whole process in one fell swoop: install the system from start to finish, reboot, and you’re ready to go. OpenSUSE might want to consider this for version 13.
I made sure that each system (Mageia, Fedora, and Windows) had a bootloader installed on the appropriate partition. I kept the Mageia bootloader on the MBR, and it was able to boot all 3 systems. That tells me there is some kind of issue with OpenSUSE that will lead me to think twice about downloading future versions of it. Any thoughts or insights on something I might have missed?
It is not quite clear to me if you now decided to use openSUSE or not.
The fact that you ask here seems to point to the fact that you want to use openSUSE. In that case, telling about how other distributions are doing things will not help many people here in understanding. It mught be that some of them used some of the ones you describe, but most have not and thus mentioning vaguely what they do will not trigger any “o yes” feelings and thus not help in understanding your problem.
Best is to present us a situation existing on your system with the problem you think you have there. In hat case people can ask you for further information (like listings of configuration files), give direct help and you can try that out immediatly.
Like with Mageia (great it’s still there) the best thing to do in cases like this one is to file a bugreport. The forums are mainly visited by users, not developpers. These people live on bugreports.
Maybe you just missed updategrub from my repo ( software.opensuse.org: updategrub). Simply typing “updategrub” as root would have added kernel entries for all your Linuxes as well as chainloader entries for other found Grubs.
I just noticed that my version of os-prober (1.56) doesn’t have a specific entry for mageia (in /usr/lib/os-prober/mounted/90linux-distro), and neither does version 1.49 currently used on openSUSE 12.2 (very likely). Thus mageia might show up as “Mandrake” or rather as “unknown Linux distribution”.
If you don’t mind posting the output of the following command under mageia, I could add an adequate label for this distro (which would appear in os-prober output and in Grub menu) - provided you use this os-prober version.
What exactly do you mean? You select boot option for Mageia and it fails to boot? You do not have menu option for Mageia? Or something else? Which bootloader you use?