hi curious of something and its late so this could be a really stupid question

about to wipe 2 boxes and wake up 3 more and tos slackware on them ALL ive had enough of mixing words. been dealing with M% support for a few days even though done IT for more then 30 years I had a couple oddballs I couldn't figure out bad mistake on my part. anyway I decided I'd rather work on making games work for my grandson then invest time in keeping a winders box stable.

so my question is. is there way to have basically a stable branch of Slackware and a test branch of Slackware (for a better terms?) on the same box

so I could log in and one login or kernel option would load the stable

and the next I could switch to the test branch (thinking trying different drivers for games kernel libs.

so is there a clean sane way to do this on one box? if i am explaining this correctly if not I'll add caffeine in the morning and try again.

basically I want a rock solid box for me to use to do daily tasks on, email, music, video. and I want my test branch to test getting games working testing new or tweaking video drivers, game control drivers. other stuff that until I get it stable I do NOT want touching or mixing in my stable branch. maybe 2 partitions is the way to go. (sorry realize what i am asking). once I get the item stable on the test branch ( the game or the driver and run it a while i'll move it to the stable branch for enjoyment) its 2tb my main box so a / one partition and / on another not sure of sizes and my /home say 1.4tb on the same HD. thanks for any and all responses all appreciated.

only thing that's slowing down my 100% conversion is need to find my new 4tb external in the closet so I can rip my data off the 2tb now.
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oh sorry one more is there any software under Linux anyone knows of like deepfreeze for Linux? reason I am asking thinking that test branch I want to use. if I had an easy way to reset it or restore it to a working point as I test stuff.

sorry for rambling i really need to get some sleep need to be up at 7am to drive my grandson to school,

regards, Robert

p.s. I realize as I type the subject dual boot slackware and slackware might be the way to go.

This is no different than dual booting any 2 different distros. You will only need 1 swap partician that can be used for both. Make 5 particians .
(1) swap about 2 x memory size
(2) ext4 partician, 14.1 stable
(3) ext4 /home partician, 14.1 stable /home
(4) ext4 partician, current
(5) ext4 /home partician, current /home

If you have two hard drives install Slackware-14.1 to the first drive and -Current to the second. That's probably better than a single disk unless you can't avoid it, otherwise use the aforementioned tip about two /(root) partitions.

If you do this do not use separate /boot partitions unless you create a boot partition for each system.

yeah for now going to keep the single 2tb and I was thinking after some good coffee this morning (I got about 18tb of networked) maybe 5tb in use first thanks for all the replies.

now two system and I think 2 boot partitions is the way to go. just for complete isolation but I was wondering if i couldn't just do one /home and just use separate user logins
for stable and test as in userstable and usertest.

would i run into permission issues in /home for userstable and usertest combined. for example what if I was to log into userstable but in the /systemtest and /boottest (just for clariity in logic I hope

would it share permissions and home in both test and share or am I needing more coffee.

so I am thinking of zrdc28 great feedback above but can I combine homes are am I setting myself up for a bad nightmare. if so why? (learning makes it a good day)

I've done a fair bit of slack installs before and love the beast. just since I am wiping my main box and know I love to tinker and program and make things work why I want a test and stable os on the same box. I like to know why it fails and understand process and structure not wipe and redo it 50 times (why I am getting such a distaste for winders 10) sorry I just did a long rant in the m$ community forums as that was m$ idea of tech support short version hyper-v failed to load. they wanted me to wipe tb, install win 7, upgrade to win 10 and then if it didn't fix it (they had hopes) they'd escalate it. then the pc locked itself into safe mode (it was safe mode with networking but wanted a networked password to log into safemode and a nice big X on the network icon at the login screen because it hadn't loaded the network driver yet) it wasn't what happened but m$ official process for dealing with it. so I said to myself who is the fool here, it has to be me for wasting my time again and again expecting a different result. I'll get my grandson's games working under Linux (there's virtual box there's wine there's play on linux) and then any mistakes I make in linux are mine.

I don't think you'll have any problems on the /home directory with permissions. I think the main reason for the suggestion of separate partitions is most like to use the same user for logging in between various machines.

And unless you're looking at doing lvm, encrypting, etc, there isn't a big reason to have a separate boot partition (well, I guess it depends on who you ask). You can just have that lumped in with your / partition.

well I plan to do a lot of custom kernel builds and tweaking and for its size /boot I was thinking having /boot1 and /boot2 boot2 being on slacktest if i mess something up and really botch something on slacktest my slackstable I use for normal and stable things email and such.

okay been reading and reading and a couple of questions seen a few recommendations for /usr and /var partitons as well.
usr I can see maybe especially on the slacktest side of my box.

and also swap double the amount of ram unless you have a lot of ram.

okay 16 gig of ram here. and I have a feeling reading that 2-4g of swap is fine? 32g of swap is fine with me to what is practical and could be used as well.

The main benefits behind separate partitions for certain folders are: 1. Easily separate actual hard disks. If you want one drive for /usr and one for /var, it makes it very easy. 2. Prevent running into issues if you overfill a particular partition. This can occur with overrun logs filling up the root partition if it isn't separated. 3. Provide the ability to mount partitions separately, sometimes to scan something.

You'll find all sorts of suggested partition schemes (and these can lead to big arguments, depending on who is talking), but until you've actually found your type of usage with Slackware, there is no "best" answer. We can give you suggestions based on our usage, but it's only anecdotal, at best. Personally, I have / and /home as separate partitions, and then I have all my extra drives mounted under /share (which I created). I have no separate boot, and unless you're looking at doing something that requires a separate /boot (usually encryption, since /boot needs to remain unencrypted), personally, I don't think there's really any benefit. You either limit how big /boot can grow, or you give it a lot of space, taking it away from elsewhere.

As for the swap, again, it is up to your usage. When you start getting into larger RAM amounts (probably 4GBs and up), for most users, it becomes more difficult justify having so much swap space. Since you have 16GB of RAM, the majority of users wouldn't ever fill that, so your 2-4GB is probably pretty reasonable. For me, I have 8GB of RAM and up to 16GB of swap (one 8GB swap partition that's always enabled on my SSD, and another 8GB swap file on a separate platter drive that I enable as needed), because sometimes I can get into very intensive memory situations, and I'll fill most of it. But my usage is not normal, so my 2x amount is not something I use for recommending swap to others.

But, my usage is going to be different than yours, and I'm not going to tell you that since it works best for me, it'll work best for you. Just trying to get all the information out

thanks for the education. much appreciated. I can't wait to get started this install. just that irl thing keeps delaying. maybe tonight when the phone stops ringing

thanks again

Rob