Can you run 2 distros AND Windows XP on one machine?
 

Yeah, I asked it!!! (LOL)
Currently running Windows XP Pro and Suse 9.0, with boot to Linux via floppy. Saw Lindows 4.5 and was immediately intrigued. Would like to run both (with similiar boot, keeping XP on too) to do comparison. Is that possible? If so, what are the semantics involved? I figure a lot of tweaking.

Got Partition Magic and was going to create another partition and swap file but it warned me about NT kernal needing to be lower than 4Gig mark, and I panicked. Any help appreciated!

Thanx in advance

Well, if it was an ordinary distribution, I'd say:

1 - Install Windows
2 - Install Suse and the boot loader on MBR
3 - Install another distribution but do _not_ install the boot loader, just update Suse's boot loader to boot all partitions/Systems.

Since I know nothing about Lindows (nor I wish to learn Lindows either ;)), I don't know if during the install it will or not overwrite the MBR, which boot loader it uses and if it can boot other Linux distributions as well. But if you want to use any other distribution, the above process should work just fine. I triple boot a machine with Win2k, Slackware and FreeBSD ;)

Mega,

Thanx for the advise. Gonna give it a try now.

Cool, lemme know please if Lindows overwrites the MBR without prompting :). So next time if someone ask I know for sure ;).

Thanks and good luck!

As for partitions, you don't need another swap or another /home. Two Linux distros can share them. I would suggest having (as a bare minimum) a NTFS partition for Windows, a swap partition, a /home partition, and two root partitions for the two distros. Also, always remember to back up your data before you do anything. ;)

Yeah, that would be good to know. I guess you already have SuSE installed, otherwise I would advise you to go with Lindows first.

How would you like running all your distros at the same time?
 

If you want to make distro comparisons, and have enough horse-power in your machine, and enough ram, one way that you can do it is to use VMWare. This way you can run all the distros at the same time, and easily switch from one to the other, without having to multi-boot.
But to accomplish this, VMWare does have a price tag to pay. However, you can try free, it for a liminted time to see if this suits your purposes.

I currently use it to compare two different Linux distros at the same time. My system is also capable to dual boot into Mandrake 9.2, if I need the full use of ram and a regular hard disk.

Hope this helps :D

My advice about Lindows (which is now Linspire, I guess - not the name I suggested to Michael) is to email customer support and ask about what you do to start an advanced install. Then, you'll be fine with the bootloader issue. Of course, its not the end of the world anyways. One can reinstall the bootloader they want, if necessary.

And, yes, multiboot is possible! As MegamanX has said, its quite doable. I have had WinXP, Mandrake, and Debian Sarge on drive 1 and Vector linux as well as FreeBSD on disk 2. It was a bit much, so I killed off a few after a bit.