As the title says, I’m trying to multiboot Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24. The documentation and guides for this all seems pretty outdated through my searching and troubleshooting.
I currently have ubuntu installed. My drive partition table looks like this:
- sda1 – EFI (250MB)
- sda2 – /boot (ext4, 2GB)
- sda3 – empty (ext4, 2TB) <-- Fedora partition
- sda4 – Ubuntu 24 (LUKS encrypted, 2TB)
I’m trying to install Fedora now and it’s giving me nothing but errors. The most useful guide I found for this specific setup just has you adding sda3 as the installation path (mounted at /) for Fedora and it’s supposed to figure out the EFI and boot, but that doesn’t happen. In fact, the EFI and /boot partitions show up under an “Unknown” tab in the Fedora custom partition window of the installation. They should be under a tab such as “Ubuntu 24 LTS”. Fedora isn’t recognizing the ubuntu installation (because it’s encrypted?)
Am I wrong in assuming that both OS’s should be sharing the EFI and /boot partitions? Maybe that’s the issue?
Anybody out there successfully dual booting Linux distros with both distros encrypted?
Shared ESP is fine as long as you don’t run out of space. Nothing in /boot should conflict but that’s not guaranteed, although having 2 potential boot partitions means having 2 potential grub configs. I’d make sda3 a ~2GB ext4 boot partition just for Fedora (mounted at /boot), and an sda5 with btrfs with a home subvolume mounted at /home, and a root subvolume mounted at /, then mount sda1 at /boot/efi (this is the default layout iirc, albeit with different partitions, ofc). This might be easier to do in the advanced blivet gui.
And yes, Linux’s boot process is a convoluted, fragile mess and there are currently multiple ongoing discussions on how to improve it.