LinuxQuestions.org - Partitioning 2 Distros

>What will I need to do when I put the College Linux CD in to install in order to successfully
>'dual-boot'?

I'm not familiar with the College Linux installer, but I'd imagine that at some point it's going to ask you how you want to partition your hard disk. If you have unpartitioned space already then this won't be a problem. Otherwise you'll have to shrink down the existing filesystems, which you can do with GNU parted (or perhaps there will be such functionality in the installer). You can use the same swap partition for both distros.

The interesting part is configuring the bootloader. It's likely that CL will want to overwrite your existing GRUB installation, but it should ask during installation exactly what you want to do. There a number of ways to deal with this:[list=1][*]Let CL do what it wants to the start of the disk, then configure CL's choice of bootloader to load Fedora as well. The necessary details for loading fedora can be copied (with minor alterations) from your fedora boot filesystem.[*]Tell CL not to write the bootloader, and later amend your GRUB configuration to boot CL. Hopefully CL will have written a bootloader configuration somewhere in its filesystem, even if it hasn't used it to take over the disk[*]Tell CL to write its bootloader to its root partition (like /dev/hda3) instead of the start of the disk (like /dev/hda). This way you can use two bootloaders in sequence. First you see your fedora GRUB, and if you choose CL then it will "chainload" the CL bootloader. To arrange this, after CL installation you'll boot into fedora, where you can add a section to your GRUB configuration to chainload the CL bootloader.[/list=1]

The last option is probably the simplest. For your new GRUB entry, you'll want something like

Code:

    

    title College_Linux

    root  (hd0,2)

    makeactive

    chainloader +1

This would be if you'd installed the CL bootloader on /dev/hda3 (GRUB has fun partition numbering).

Luck.