Trying out Linux

albi_dragon · 10-11-2008, 12:05 PM

Hi, I'm currently on Vista and looking at various Linux distro's to try out.
I was wondering if it is possible to download a few different ISO's (e.g. Mandriva, Fedora, Linux Mint) and put them on one DVD?
Or will I have to make 3 separate DVDs.
I thought I'd ask before I go out and buy more blank DVDs.

Thanks in advance!

akinlinux · 10-11-2008, 12:44 PM

Try virtualize them if you don't have enough empty dvds around.

Virtualbox or wmware, there are probably more for windows.

jschiwal · 10-11-2008, 02:13 PM

The DVD for a recent Linux Format magazine (LXFDVD110) has a quadruple-booting DVD. You can boot right into Sabayon, Fedora, Gentoo or Slax Live distros. It also has Ubuntu, Puppy and Dam Small Linux ISOs. The iso's in the dvd are CD sized. If the DVD live distro's are too large, then the total size will be more than 8GB and wouldn't fit. Plus configuring syslinux and the initrd scripts to do this yourself would be a lot of work. Blank DVDs aren't expensive. You would probably run through more blank discs trying to debug a merged DVD than you would burning each to a dvd.

albi_dragon · 10-11-2008, 03:17 PM

thanks lol. I've just gone with the virtualbox idea, even though it seems I cant check out the fancy graphics. but its still good enough. thanks guys!

loperz7 · 10-11-2008, 03:36 PM

Or the smaller internet install ones which means it will install most of the system from internet resources.

Gentoo

Nightfish · 10-11-2008, 04:57 PM

what I did once is get a grub loader on a bootable DVD that let me select between slax, knoppix, ubuntu live cds, a portable windows 98 and a recovery console. This is of course if you're looking for live cd usage, if not, a simple autoexec.bat on a bootable dvd that let's you select between setups of different distros. for the uberlive-cd i descrived earlier, you can find your best choice of live-cd distros on distrowatch, then unpack them, and get the grubloader disk to boot from specific directories.

Fedora Development

swi3zy · 01-16-2009, 08:17 AM

I would advise VirtualBox made by Sun. It's free, fast, and stable I am running new Ubuntu under WinXP on my 1.5Ghz 2G ram laptop and it works smoothly.
Here is the link:
http://www.virtualbox.org/

And here is the link for tuturial on making multiboot dvds under Linux:
http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/ente.../105070101.asp