Hi Debian community!

I'm a newbie user of linux. I came succesfully across an installation of mandrake 9.0 on my WinXp machine and currently the dual boot system works fine. More recently upgraded to MDK 9.1.

As I got more and more informated about Debian's philosophy, I'd like to give it a taste. But I don't want to migrate because I don't feel my skills preparate for it. What I'm suggesting is a three-boot system for testing and learning Debian without prescinding of a system that works for me and I need to keep it working for very important reasons. Migration will take place once I get confident.

Perhaps I'm not a good information hunter, but I didn't find nothing about how to install Debian together with other distros in the same machine.

I'll appreciate every information, link, advice... on this topic. Thanks a lot!

well, first of all you have to make room for debian (say 2GB for binaries + 500M for /home, which you may share among mdk and deb)
actually resizing a ext2 fs is not so easy, so if you can, steal it from a fat.
Take a written note of which partition will host which os/mountpoint
Then install debian sharing the same swap as mdk.
You may want to mount mdk / on /mnt/mdk, to take inspiration from its /etc folder (be careful: mandrake is not too clean).
When it comes to choosing bootloader, install it in debians own partition.
you may whant a bootdisk, too.
then reboot in mdk (so you have an already configured system to work in)
and edit your bootloader config file.
i'd reccomand grub as a bootloader for such a system: it's much more flexible.

Add your debian entry to menu.list with either kernel path or chainloader to deb partition (if you installed lilo in there)
see (and maybe print) man grub for details

If you fail there's no problem, grub will always be able to boot your system even with corrupted config file.

enjoy your deb

PS: woody is getting old, if u have a good internet connection cosider upgrading to sarge (testing), despite its name it's fairly stable.

Thanks a lot.

You made a great post, but I feel still a little disoriented. To make it clear, I'll show you what are my current partitions in my 40 GB IDE hard disk:

/dev/hda1 : windows (50%)

/dev/hda5 : / )
/dev/hda6 : swap >(50% 5+6+7)
/dev/hda7 : /home )

There is another partition , hda 2, that appears to be some sort of addition of 5+6+7 (¿?). Everything goes fine with Lilo.

hda1 will be drastically resized to a minimum, what makes some 15 GB avalaible for Debian installation. Note that my partitions are not in /mnt but in /dev.

My concerns start in figuring how to achieve everything you adviced, because I need to learn before to understand it. Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 for Intel x86 states:
"It may be able (Debian) to share some partitions with other Linux systems, but that's not covered here". I wonder where is covered this topic. And this is the kind of help that I really need.

Thanks once more.

you can safely share your /home , so you will get consistent preferences, mail, etc. I recommend against sharing binaries like /usr, since you don't actually have space problems! Of course you can share swap partition, too.
Do as follows: shrink hda1 to make room for another primary partition. I'm not sure if it will be named hda2 or hda3 (currently hda2 is an extended partition that contains the following ones). 10GB are more than enough, maybe someday you will resize it again to install hurd or freebsd
Then install debian on it. In the installation program mount:
/dev/hda7 -> /home
/dev/hda5 -> /mnt/mdk
don't install a bootloader. instead, boot to mandrake, edit /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/grub.conf (tell me if you have trouble). If you use lilo, remembrer to run /sbin/lilo.
Enjoy big debian family!
Alessandro

PS: Tell me if everything goes well

My apologies for delay in answering.

Yes... It was yesterday when finally I got Debian installed!

I had to learn lots of things before I was totally aware about you where trying to tell me!
I followed absolutely the basic guidelines you posted before. I did only minor customization,
i. e. mounted also /dev/hda1 -> /mnt/windows. Had no problems editing /etc/lilo.conf
in Mandrake. Added /dev/hda3 /mnt/debian ext3 defaults 1 1 in /etc/fstab of Mandrake
to get it automatically mounted at start up.

I installed a very basic configuration of Debian, without X, all pure comand line, for learning
purposes. I can actually go across all my filesystems, Linuxes and windows. And I shall per-
sonalize later.

In fact, the installation of Debian was not as threatening as I imagined before... This is not
to say that it was as easy as I found to be Mandrake's one, because it demands a
knowledge of about what one is doing at every moment and almost anything goes automati-
cally without one's consent.

Thanks once more!