Dual boot Batocera and other Linux distributions

The most common way of booting Batocera for PC is to use a USB pen drive. You can use it along a dedicated partition on your hard drive to host ROMs, while booting in USB.

However, some people prefer to have Batocera directly installed on the main hard drive, along with another OS in a separate partition on the same drive. Here are some examples on how to dual boot Batocera with popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Ordinarily, Batocera utilizes syslinux to boot. Thus, for most dual boot setups we will be utilizing GRUB to show a boot selection menu after BIOS instead.

Follow your favorite method for the initial Ubuntu install.

Once Ubuntu ins installed, make sure the command grub-customizer is available on your system (it is available from Ubuntu repositories).

Create 2 consecutive partitions on your hard drive

• Partition 1 : type = fat32, name = BATOCERA, flags = legacy_boot & msftdata
• Partition 2 : type = ext4. It must be created and placed right after the BATOCERA partition.

Then download boot.tar.xz and unzip it on the BATOCERA partition.

Use grub-customizer: create new and write BATOCERA as its name or anything you like, with type “other”.

Then, with gparted or blkid, find the UUID from your BATOCERA partition. In the example below, 3377-44C4 is my UUID, don't forget to adapt to yours.

Paste the following code:

insmod fat
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 3377-44C4
linux /boot/linux label=BATOCERA console=tty3 quiet loglevel=0 vt.global_cursor_default=0
initrd /boot/initrd.gz

Save and reboot.

For other distributions like Linux Mint 19.03, you can use the following method.

Follow your favorite method for the initial Mint install.

Create 2 consecutive partitions on your hard drive:

• Partition 1: type = fat32, name = BATOCERA
• Partition 2: type = ext4. It must be created and placed right after the BATOCERA partition.

Then download boot.tar.xz and unzip it on the BATOCERA partition.

Download the following file and save it to /etc/grub.d/15_batocera

15_batocera

#! /bin/sh

BATOCERA_UUID=$(lsblk --fs --noheadings --pairs -o TYPE,LABEL,UUID |
		       grep -E '^TYPE="part" LABEL="BATOCERA" UUID="[^"]*"$' |
		       sed -e s+'^TYPE="part" LABEL="BATOCERA" UUID="\([^"]*\)"$'+'\1'+ | head -1)

if test -n "${BATOCERA_UUID}"
then
    echo "Image batocera found on ${BATOCERA_UUID}" >&2

    cat <<EOF
menuentry "batocera.linux" {
	insmod fat
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root ${BATOCERA_UUID}
	linux /boot/linux label=BATOCERA console=tty3 quiet loglevel=0 vt.global_cursor_default=0
	initrd /boot/initrd.gz
}
EOF
fi

The file can also be automatically downloaded with the following command:

sudo wget https://​batocera.org/​upgrades/​grub/​15_batocera -O /​etc/​grub.d/​15_batocera

Then run the following commands:

sudo chmod a+x /​etc/​grub.d/​15_batocera
sudo update-grub

Eventually, it will output the following:

  ... 
​Image batocera found on 3377-44C4
  ...	
  

Reboot.