Well, I've pestered so many of my family to switch to Linux that they are telling me to 'get a life.' Kind of reminds me of Will Shatner telling all these Star Trek wannabees, "Have you ever kissed a girl? Maybe they are right. I've finally compiled the kernel, but nobody seems to care.... Life is cruel.

Anyways, I have finally achieved nirvana with three distros of Linux: The main one is Mandrake 8.1, but I run Red Hat 7 on the same machine because it works better with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. And I have an old 386 laptop that I run Slackware 3.4 on. I don't even use Windows 95 anymore, just DOS and Win 3.1 to use my scanner and run some genealogy software. Everything is running well so I don't want to change it.

I know what you mean. It is frustrating to be so excited about something and everybody else just looks at you like you're crazy.

Yep. It's not a popularity contest. It amazes me that so few recognize the significance of the free software movement. They probably don't have the time or inclination to get involved. It's an idea that's time will come, eventually. And when it does we'll be laughing!

Dear HarryG,
It looks like you've put multiple distros on one machine, perhaps the same physical drive. How does one do so?

To be more specific: I have RH 7.2 installed (waitaminnit, it may be on the first physical drive, with more OS's probably having to go on the second physical drive). I got 8.0, but would like to keep 7.2 in its own installation on the machine (geek mantra: never throw anything away). There are or will be separate partitions for all these (W98, 7.2, 8.0; Mandrake & more with time). But when I go into 8.0 install, I think it was during the partitioning part, that something seems to become aware that in the filesystem (I understand to x OS's physical drives are almost irrelevant) there is already a "/" "root" and "/boot"... as if to go ahead might wind up overwriting existing files. I bailed the installation before even getting to the fateful "Commit install, Y or N?"

Something operating at the partition level should not be aware of files within file systems within partitions... I would think.

I'm learning, but there is always much one does not know. I've been in IT/MIS for years, but my Linux knowledge is moderate.

Doug/tux[is]nottux

Your installer should let you install on any partition you like. Just make sure you know what you have on a particular partition before you format it. All your linux distros can share a single swap partition though.

There are several related HOWTOs at the Linux Documentation Project:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Multiboot-with-LILO.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html

You can also run another Linux distribution within Linux with the user-mode kernel Extremely


The User-mode Linux Kernel Home Page

Try that in the Microsoft OSs and compare the TCO.

I doubt that you will come to the conclusion that Microsoft wants you to.