I know DEUL booting kinda imply's 2 os's, well I kinda want to install 5, or so.

I was thinking more along the lines of the major distros, including hat, drake, suse, slackware and debian. I think its technicly feasable ... but im not quite sure. Obviously, providing that I have enough hard disk space, and partitions ? Could I actualy do this ?

also - I dont know about the boot partition, I dont think I can have 5 / I wouldent really want 5 boot partitions... Can I, somehow, merge them all ?

also, to conserve hdd space ( I only want to use about 20 gigs ), can I install app's on a seperate partition ? the '/' (?) partition, and have all os's derive their applications from here ?

many thanks

* bump * is this possible - someone answer !!

it'd not really be feasible to have more than one on there at once, it might be theoretically possible by specifying different prefixes, e.g /usr/mdk/bin but that'd be a bit pointless really. you can happily share /home and /boot (with 5 distro's a shared boot would be for the best really... and use grub, not lilo which doesn't scale as well at all) but you can have as many root partitions as you want really, but sharing them isn't a great idea.

take a look at this -- 37 OSes on one computer, lol ("don't try this at home!" heh) :

http://www.maximumpc.com/features/fe...002-09-24.html

--- F Y I ---

deul is not a word.

Your are referring to 'dual booting'.

I've had about 5 Linux Distros, FreeBSD, Windows XP, and Windows 98. All with LILO.

I cut back to 2 Linux Distros, FreeBSD, and Windows XP(For when other people need the computer)

Ive sort of ' cut back ' to 3 distros atm --- windows xp, hat 9, and slackware.

ive got all 3 installed, all work ( bar a mouse problem in slack, a case of running xf86 config again, I think ? ), ive installed lilo, purly because im not so great with text file editing, and lilo has a gui within the kde controll centre. the problem is, its completely, and utterly, crap should I stick with lilo or change to grub, as someone suggested ? --- if that is the case, is there a gui for grub configuration anywhere ? many thanks, ill keep trying, hehe.


side note : in hat, it crash's about 4/5 times when I try to ' add remove packages '. ive heard of a 3rd party rpm management program - is that drasticly better than the default hat 9 one ? cheers.

yes you can do it. I had Suse+MDK+Slack+RH+XP

you can save the swap space. You can create only one swap space and use it for each distro.

Here is how I did those:

I had XP installed before. So I created linux partition with PartitionMagic (out of 80GB i set aside only 15GB for XP).

First I installed RedHat with GRUB bootloader in MBR.
And then I configured it (it can be done during the installation) for dual boot with XP.

Later on, either I installed lilo/grub in Root or discareded it completely for the rest of the distros. Once the installation of a distro is finished i boot to RedHat and edit the Grub to include the newly installed distro.

Finally, I select the distro option from RedHat-Grub menu which supports lengthy words (unlike MDK lilo/grub which wont support lengthy labels).

But be careful other than RedHat or whatever your starting distro is dont include "root=LABEL=/" for other distros but just include "root=/dev/hdax" where x is the root partition number for your distro. (for each distro i mounted only one partition that is /).
And I have a common "swap" for every distro.


Simple..............right...try out.

thats EXACTLY what I want to do... but to avoid reinstalling redhat and selecting grub - how do I overwrite lilo, and install grub ?

my problem with dual booting. - you can only use one OS at once without using 3rd party software, I am too lazy to keep rebooting the machine to go to a different one.

why the hell use two os's at the same time - and how the fuck is that possible ??! also - rebooting takes 30 seconds, if you're too lazy to wait for that, you have problems...

use vmware. if u have a very fast machine, u can have 3+ OSes running simultaneously.

you can replace lilo with grub by using "grub-install"
i guess "grub-install /dev/hda" will do it.
if not find out more abt "grub-install"

can I just tap that into a standerd terminal window as root ?

yeah, is appears I can grub is intsalled, successfully. !! one last thing, what would I need to type in the menu.lst for slackware - its needs diferent options to redhat ?, do I point the menu.lst to the boot partion of slackware, or the ' / ' partition ? thanks.

the boot partition is : hda11

the ' / ' partition is : hda 12