ok so pardon me first of all, if i am posting this and it is already posted - i just couldnt find it, and was looking almost an hour on LQ.

now question that i have is this:

as many of you guys probably are, if your somewhat newbie at least to linux, your still trying to find exactly what distro you should use....well, ive used FC4, FC3, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandrive 10.2, Mandriva 10.3 beta, Mandrake 10.1....

now im going to setup my box, to be able to have a choice of whatever distro i want, at boottime....only so that if i were to want debian, ill just choose debian kernel, and it will boot....

im using two hard drives, of course hda, and hdb...
hda is a 60GB and hdb is a 120GB.

now i know that you can use your home directory/partition on different distros, as ive used it over and over again on all the ones ive tried....however, what other directories are possible to use in different distros?
for example,
can i use the /usr directory on all of the distros i wish to install?
can i use the same / directory (im guessing definitely not)?
can i use the same /var, or /etc directories?

please help, as this is needed asap - but i probably have not worded this very well, although consider i still am quite new, and need whatever help possible...

whatever questions you have of details that i have left out and are needed, i will gladly reply and answer them...

I suppose you *could* conceivably share all of them, but it'd be a hell of a lot of work keeping all the versions straight. I wouldn't advise anybody sharing /var, /etc/ or /usr

You can share swap, /boot and /home partitions easily enough, but you're pushing it with any other directories.

alright, thanks....would you also answer me partially one other question?
in all of the tut's ive read, and help for creating partitions and what sizes the partitions should be, it always gives me listings for using

about 5+ GB for /home
5+ for /usr
and then the rest of the partitions, such as /var, /tmp, and all being less than 1GB....

am i overkilling it considering my home partition is 38GB, my /usr is 15GB, my /var is 5GB, my /tmp is 8GB, boot being 2GB, and swap being 768MB.....

i just dont know if thats overkill, but i do know that my past systems have used about 10-15 for /usr and such......

and i do know my /home may be a little big, but i have all distro's ive used copied on iso's in a folder or two, not to mention just about anything ive ever downloaded.....

should i make them all smaller?

Have a look how much space is being used on each partition!

I would guess for most distros 500 megs for /, 100 megs for /tmp, 500 megs for /var, 6 gigs for /usr is plenty, thats the sort of figures I stick to anyway. /home depends on how much 'personal' data you have, I for example keep all my audio, video and software downloads on a separate hdd, so for my /home 10 gigs is more than plentiful for my mail/website/work, however you may need more. Remember just because you have a big hdd doesn't mean you have to use all of it now, if you do you restrict what you can do in the future, I have about 16 gigs formatted on my 80 gig hdd, the rest is unformatted and free to do anything I want if I need that space.

Oh, another tip create /home last so on the hdd /home is at the end of the formatted space, behind /home there should just be empty space so if you do run out of space on /home you can just grow it

See that link in my signature, "Getting started with Linux"? It's full of advice on how to partition your hard drive

ok....thanks to both of you....
also, now i really do know this is highly off subject, but only because i have to ask....now of course, i have my cd with gentoo on it, but how in the world do you go about installing it?

ive looked up just about every single install guide on gentoo, but i get lost and confused.....
is there any newbie guide you guys know of for installation of gentoo? because that is one of the distro's i do have downloaded, but never have gotten to try....

however, i do know that i would like to build i think a stage 2.....but not completely sure....thx tho