Does anyone have any experience with installing 2 linuxs and a freeBSD on a harddrive

babyboss · 10-23-2004, 12:48 AM

I am trying to install 3 different linux operation systems. They are Fedro Core 2, Slackware and FreeBSD.
Can anyone discuss with me anything about the particition and installation procedures?

musicman_ace · 10-23-2004, 01:43 AM

with 60 posts, I'd hope you would know not to post the same question in multiple forums.

Tinkster · 10-23-2004, 03:46 AM

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=246220

Please do not post the same thread in more than one forum. Picking the most relevant forum and posting it once there makes it easier for other members to help you and keeps the discussion all in one place.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

This post has been reported for closure.

dsegel · 10-23-2004, 10:09 AM

The other post was closed, so I'll reply to this one.

I have several linux distros and FreeBSD installed on one system, although I have the BSD install on a different hard drive than the linux distros.

In any case, the key for me was to tell BSD not to install it's boot loader onto the MBR of your main booting disk. After that you can just use grub to load it by creating an entry like this:

Code:

title FreeBSD 5.2.1
        root (hd0,4,a)
        chainloader +1

That tells Grub to pass off loading to whatever it finds on disk 0, partition 4, slice a.

babyboss · 10-23-2004, 11:51 AM

What about partition things? Both slackware and redhat requires ext3, but what about FreeBSD?
From which cylinder of my harddrive gemetory should be swap, and fedora core 2 and slackware. I believe the gemoetry of my hard drive is really important because i have so many operating systems on one hard drive. If I don't part my distribution on the right disk, I might have unwanted problems in the the future.

dsegel · 10-23-2004, 02:18 PM

Slackware and Red Hat don't "require" ext3, although that may be the default filesystem for new installs. Pretty much all linux distros support ext3, but none I'm aware of require it. In any case, ext3 is a filesystem and has nothing to do with partitioning.

Don't worry about the disk geometry or where you're putting the partitions except that you should probably set up BSD in a primary partition instead of an extended partition. You can share a swap partition between linux distros, but you'll create a new one for the BSD install. I have Windows, FreeBSD, and 4 linux distros all on two disks in my system.

From a linux perspective the entire BSD install goes into one partition, and it's divided into "slices" from the BSD perspective.

chort · 10-23-2004, 11:55 PM

Moving to general since it doesn't really fit in any other forum.