hi! this is karthik. Iam doin my final year B.tech(information Tech.) at chennai in INDIA.I go bananas over LINUX. iam to do a project on LINUX this semester as a part of my curriculum.
can one have different distributions of LINUX say(REDHAT & MANDRAKE) on the same system. if an utility for that doesnt exist do lemme know so that i wud take that as a project and do. Hopin for ur reply,

Karthik

What kind of utility you are talking about?
I generally just install another distro and configure the bootloader - no problem.

Welcome to LQ, Shadowman.

Yep, you can. At one point I had Linux Mandrake, Redhat and Slackware on the same system, as well as WinME and QNX. I think I've actually had more than that at some point or other, but I can't really remember. What you need to do is this:
Install one Linux system but leave enough blank space on your harddisk for the other(s). Then install the second Linux system but choose to not install any bootloader in the second one. Once you have them both installed, reboot. You will only be given the option of booting the first one, but that's OK for the time being. Boot to your first install of Linux and go to the command line (console). Mount the partition that holds the 2nd Linux distro's kernel image and copy the file over to your 1st Linux distro's partition. Edit your bootloader (lilo or grub) and put in an entry for the 2nd distro, pointing it to the 2nd kernel image file (that should, by now, reside on both partitions). In the case of Lilo, rerun it to put the additions into effect. Reboot and cross your fingers. You should now have a system where you can boot into either. Oh, and a note: you can use the same SWAP partition for both... you don't need to have 2 swap partitions.