Can you run multiple Distros on the same PC?
 

So right now, I have Ubuntu and Suse on 2 separate computers, and both are set up as dual boot systems between Windoze and Linux.

My question is, is it possible to set up one PC to boot from different Distros? I imagine it must be, but when I boot up the installer for either Distro i mentioned above, it wants to delete the already installed Linux OS to install itself onto.

I imagine it's possible, but how 'newb' easy/hard is it?


One last thing.. how exactly do you pronounce 'Suse' :scratch:

Best way to do it is to create the partitions yourself. Then you can have as many distros as you want installed (providing you have enough hard drive space).

And I believe SuSE is pronounced "soo-suh" (at least, it was the last time I looked into it).

Do you have your partitions setup for each distro? If not, set the amount of storage you want for each distro. Then make them bootable. If you are going to do it manually, make sure you set some for swap. I think the easiest way, would be to do this with Ubuntu. But I am not sure, I have never used Suse.

Make sure you only use one loader. (grub, lilo, etc.) I think Ubuntu uses Grub.

Is this clear?

By the way Suse = SooSe (like moose)

Do I need to install a swap partition for every distro I install, though? Or can I set up 1 swap partition, and have the other OS's point to the same one?

Hi,

You can use the same 'swap' partition between installed distributions.

Can someone share a partition that is a file partition between distros?
A partition for each distro - a small one, and a partition for swap, and a big partition for movies, text, music etc.

Let's say they all use the same file system.
So is it possible to load a distro from one partition but make it write info to a big partition that each distro will use - so if I download something in one distro I won't need to mount different partitions to be able to read files downloaded in other distros.

And does it need to be a /home partition?

Thanks.

Gentoo

Hi,

If it's data of any kind as long as the filesystem is readable by the OS then you can share. That's the reason behind '/home' to allow that user to login and use the files within his/her structure. You could setup a partition that has a recognizable filesystem to share between your different OS, as stated that each must be able to read/write the filesystem.

The problem with '/home' maybe with the way your user is setup on one distribution vs another.

It is possible for multiple distros to use the same swap partition. In fact, most distro's installers will set them up that way. Mine is.

I use a single (fat32) partition among three OSs (winXP, Ubuntu, and Slackware) for general data. You may not want to use fat32, I only used it because it was easy.

If you want to use a single /home partition among different Linux distros, you can, but I'd be careful that you don't have different versions of programs writing to the same config/data directories. It sounds like a recipe for crashes and/or data loss.

I think what you are trying to do is efficiently use your disk space, but I don't see the /home partition as being that large most of the time.