How to penta boot linux distros?
 

Hello everyone,


I have a core 2 duo PC with 2 GB ram and ATI graphic card. I already have Windows XP installed on the PC. I also wish to install four 32 bit linux distros and create a penta boot set up. I wish install: 1- Mepis, 2- Solus OS 3- Linux Mint and 4- Ubuntu. Kindly inform me how to do that? Also is 30 GB space for each distro enough? Kindly inform and guide. :)

1. back up all important data

2. Get the GParted Live CD, and use that to create all the partitions (the first step will be re-sizing the Windows partition**)

Each OS needs maybe 7GB---then make another partition for data (to be shared with all the OSes)

the final setup might look like this:
Windows 1-3 partitions**
Linux 5 each at 7GB
Swap 2GB
shared data (use all the remaining space, or---if you have room--- leave some unallocated.

3. Install the first distro, and let it install the bootloader.

4. Install the others, but no NOT install the bootloader each time---instead, go back and edit the grub config file (once) for all the others.


**windows might have several partitions already---resize the main one (where all the actual Windows stuff is)

PS---you'll probably wind up making all the Linux drives logical---linux does not care and you can have LOTS of logical partitions.

almost any Linux will read the Windows NTFS files, so, you can simply leave the Windows data where it is. To get Windows to read the Linux files, you can install SW in Windows.

Might make it easy and load a free virtual machine.

Hi saad1gamer,
Welcome to LQ.
BTW why are you installing all the four distros that are debian/ubuntu based? Why not use something based on RedHat and Slackware and gentoo too for a change?
Or you can install just 2 distros and run whatever you want in VMs.
My 2 cents :)

Thank you for your replies and I am sorry for the late reply from my part. Actually I wish to use a Linux distro and stick to it. It should be stable as well as close to being equivalant to Windows in ways that it should have a large number of bug free and fresh applications. I understand that no distro could have the equal number of applications as Windows but the distro should at least be close to being an alternative to Windows. For that I have chosen Debian based distros as Debian has a large number of applications. In the end I would stick with the best distro. Red Hat based distros are for the enterprise and are not suitable for everything. I may test Slackware distros sometime in future. Also instead of using virtual machines I wish to test the distros on my machine and understand them. It would give me a better idea. I have dropped Ubuntu from the list as Linux Mint is everything Ubuntu has and is very easy to set up; works out of the box. So now I have to quad boot the three linux distros 1- Linux Mint, 2- Mepis, 3- Solus OS along with Windows XP. Following is my current hard disk partition set up:


C: 62.1 GB (Has Windows XP)

D: 62.1 GB (Has Windows Data)

E: 62.1 GB (Free)

F: 74.5 GB (Another hard drive - Free)


Kindly advise me how should I partition the hard disk to install these OSes. Also as pixellany mentioned, each OS needs 7 GB of space, I am confused about it. The reason is that Windows needs a lot of space for its applications. So if I install and download the important applications of Linux Oses it may require more space. Kindly also advise me about that. I may also install other DEs like Gnome for Mepis and KDE for Solus OS as well as their applications so what size shoud I give to each OS. With my best regards.:)

To clarify:

When setting up a system with many different versions of Linux, I would typically NOT install every application in each one---I would have one to use and then the others for experiments and evaluation.

I just checked my Arch install and it's a bit over 8GB, not including data. I have browser, e-mail, libreoffice, GIMP, shotwell, hugin, simple scan, inkscape, brasero, Adobe reader, and WINE with google sketchup. A bit more that a minimum system, but not huge.

If you want a lot of apps in each Linux version, then 10GB each might be better.

From my personal experience, I would not be surprised to see you set this up 10-20 times before you get it "just right"