Fedora 13 32bit and then Linux Mint 32bit and then Ubuntu 10.04 32bit
 

Guys I'm really crappy at dealing with partitioning, how do I go about this one, installing Fedora 13, Linux Mint and Ubuntu 10.04 in that exact order and I want GRUB to come from Ubuntu.

I've tried partitioning on my own and even in my own inexperienced observation, I think I've created some form of HDD dystopia...reason being is that the paritions were created haphazardly just to go ahead with the installs.

To make things simple, which words should I render all too important during partition and how do I put these words together to create a respectably partitioned HDD for all 3 OSes.

PS I like the idea of installing all 3 and just space swap between the trio. How do I do this?

Well, you are going to need logical volumes. So something like

Now, the tricky part will be to install 2 out of the 3 of those without installing grub. So you *do not* want grub installed from Fedora nor Mint. But their installers might not give you the option =(. What you might do is install them in the order Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, pointing to sda1 as /boot each time, and backing it up before the next install. You'll need all of the kernel* vmlinuz* System.map* etc, for each distro. Finally, install Ubuntu last and copy all of the boot files over to the same boot partition, and uninstall grub from Fedora and Mint. If you can get it, this is the cleanest option IMO.

Another option, which would be much easier to setup AND maintain, would be to have a separate boot partition for each OS, and use Grub's chainloader feature to point to the others. In this case, you might only want:

set the BOOT flag on sda1. When you are installing each OS, don't create a separate boot partition. This option also gives you the flexibility to copy over the boot files from each OS to any of the other's boot directory, so you can skip the chainloading if you want.

pardon the ignorance but GRUB chainloader???

on another part, theoretically what if I do this:

/dev/sda1-boot
/dev/sda5-swap
/dev/sda6-Ubuntu
/dev/sda7-Mint
/dev/sda8-Fedora

how would things be looking like from start up to the GRUB page?

I think this observation might clinch it.

How come Linux Mint and Ubuntu can be installed side by side without any hoopla, fracas or fiasco??

Chainloading is a way for you to have multiple bootloaders on the same system.

The order of the partitions doesn't matter.