Slackware and a debian on board ? but how ...

Hi

i want to instell slackware on a somewhat older machine, and a smaller debian.
In short, i want to dual boot, and would prefer to use grub

BTW, you can replace debian with some other distributions, it doesnt matter, my point is just that i want to use slackware on that PC, and another distribution.

however, I am confused.

Anyone who can help me how to approach this goal properly and without much hassle - though i am willing to spend time to research, i just dont want to go wrong paths -
please share your wisdom.

My main problem is how will the 2nd installed distribution know about the 1st one and set itself in a way that GRUB will display the proper distributions.
And also, how do i share files between these 2 distributions.
They all must go to one harddisc btw, its 40 gigs so i guess enough place for pretty everything.
I am not a Linux newbie anymore, so feel free to be short. Thanks for help.

I would think that grub will not update automagically after the second install, you will have to edit menu.lst/grub.conf, it is easy to setup a multi boot in grub (specially for 2 Gnu/Linux distros).

You share files by proprely set your partitions and define mount points to mount common partitions like /home.

If I were you, I would install Debian with grub bootloader, set all partitions at this stage (say /boot, /, /home and 2 other partitions which will contains slackware's /boot and / plus maybe some other custom partitions which will contains various data and will be shared the 2 systems). Then I would install slackware without lilo.

It is my point of view, you can also use only one /boot partition for the 2 systems, up to you.

In Debian you can mount the Slackware partitions and vice versa. So sharing data would not be a problem as long as both kernels support the filesystems used.

You can share the swap partition as well, there is no need to create a second swap partition.

Sharing a boot partition could be a good idea, but you will have to remember which kernel you'll use for Slackware and which kernel belongs to your Debian install. Smart (re)naming of files will solve that.

ok guys, thanks

didnt know that i can share the swap partition neither