Hi,

Now im planning to install two linux distribtutions on my IBM R51 laptop (Slackware offcourse & gentoo)

The laptop has a 40GB drive.

How should my partitiontable for the two distributions look?

Would I be able to let them use the same /boot /home /var etc dir?

Sincerely, Jorgen

I have two versions of SuSE (9.1 and 10) installed alongside each other, as well as Windows 98. I have two Linux partitions (using ReiserFS) and one swap partition which is shared by both distros. The Linux partitions on my disk are 27GB and 20GB respectively, but both are less than 1/3 full, so partitions of around 18GB should be fine. The swap partition is 1GB.

Using the same /home directory should be no problem. Either add a line in /etc/fstab to mount the /home of one distro on /home in the other, or create a fourth partition and mount this on /home in both. Not so sure about sharing the other directories - think it would depend on them having compatible setups. I know that some of the files in SuSE's /etc are quite different to those in other distros.

I actually installed SuSE 10 long after installing 9.1, using the installer to resize the partition. Despite the warnings it gave me, it worked perfectly. I've stuck since with 9.1 because I have found some things on my system that I can't get working in 10 (e.g. my modem)

Good Luck,
Rob

Apart from swap it is not suggested you share partitions between two distros. You could share /boot as well, but is somewhat tricky as you need to move the kernel image and eventually the initrd image (if present) of distro #2 to the /boot partition of distro #1. Then edit the /etc/fstab of distro #2 according to your needs.
Do not share /home and /var partitions since they usually contains a lot of dot config files necessary for X server, bash, printer sockets and so on...distro specific
Also remember not to install Lilo/Grub on both distros.
My suggestion is you create a mount point of your choice (ie /distro2) on distro #1 and after mounting the distro #2 /boot partition there, you edit /etc/lilo.conf adding a section for distro #2 as necessary and run lilo.

This is my /etc/lilo.conf if can help

# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hdb8
label = Linux
append = "hdd=ide-scsi hde=ide-scsi"
read-only
image = /suse/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11.4-21.7-default
initrd = /suse/boot/initrd-2.6.11.4-21.7-default
root = /dev/hdb5
label = Suse
read-only
# Linux bootable partition config ends

Ask if not clear
Ciao

It's very clear. Now i'm running dual boot slackware/gentoo on my R51. Thanks for your help