partitions for multiboot
 

hi everyone, i am trying at the moment to setup up a multiboot system on my laptop, i need to keep windows 7 on it for work purposes, but i am planning on installing 4 different distros of linux on there as well, after windows i have over 400 gig spare so what i wanted to do was create 4 partitions of 80 gigs each plus a swap drive partition that each distro of linux can share, is 80 gig each enough for fedora security lab, kubuntu, ubuntu multimedia studio and linux mint 9? also what format should i partition each as? can i make each distro create a home drive within its own partition? many thanks in advance

pete

I have a similar setup - a Windows 7 partition plus three other partitions, including one with Debian Squeeze. 80 gigs will be plenty for the installation files of each distro and I believe that all of the distros you want to install would support ext3... IIRC K/Ubuntu can support ext4. As far as your home directory, I'd create a 5th partition and use that for mounting /home for all of the Linux installations - that way you could re-use/re-format any of your other Linux partitions and your home directory wouldn't be affected, and you wouldn't have multiple home directories/files to deal with.