I would like to create a dual boot setup on a new SSD with Centos 7 and Fedora 23. I will create separate /home and /opt partitions. I have an old MBR BIOS.

I have several questions.

Is it possible to share a /boot partition or is it better that each distribution has its own /boot partition ? I have read that Fedora always creates its own.

Does it matter in which order I install them ?

If I run KDE Plasma on Centos 7 and Cinnamon on Fedora 23 will there be any problems sharing the /home partition ?

Thank you for your help.

You can share a boot partition and if you use the standard LVM install with CentOS, you will need a separate boot partition.
The order of installation should not matter.

If you are not an experienced user, you are quite likely to have problems doing this. Better to create a separate data partition.

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I guess you could share a /boot but loader information would have to be very much correct and any updates may not know how to handle it.

We had a different thread about sharing /home. As I recall the prospect of sharing it was frowned upon.


The only thing going for you in this setup is that they are basically both red hat so it may work as you wish. I would not even try it unless I had a lot of web pages telling me how to do it.

This is quite correct as that is what I do. I also share swap between the two as well.

The problem with updates is that the two systems are following slightly different kernel lines - thus one may purge a kernel that the other is using... or wants to preserve for backup purposes.

In my case, I found it easier (trivial actually) to do this with grub legacy rather than grub2. Since grub legacy is no longer updated by the updates, the two directories (grub and grub2) only get grub2 modified. Modifying the grub configuration file (all ONE of it) is easy when adding/removing kernels. It is also easy to have both in the same file, just by using different titles.

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jpollard, interesting tips.