I rely on Sarge for all my everyday tasks, but Etch is becoming more and more appealing to me. I just do not want to completely switch because the last time i did I lost a lot of KDE apps because of dependency issues and All kinds of other issues.

I have a Gateway MX6425 notebook with 100gb of hard drive space. I currently have installed Debian Sarge 3.1r1, Windows XP Pro SP2, and Windows Vista Beta 2 build 5308.

During my original XP/Vista sizing of the partitions I guessed too big, so I shrank them down and now have another 10 gb of space to play with (i can get more if Etch needs it). So I decided to install Etch on this extra space.

I have a server with 260gb of space I use as a NFS File Server for my home network. This is where I store all my music, docs, and work.. So This leaves a lot of room left on the notebook, which is why I am putting on many OS's.

My Sarge partition is the biggest and most important to me. It is where I do 99% of my work (web design & programming) and it has apache2, php4, mysql 4.1, unixODBC, and a few other small server apps, including all my websites stored on /var/www. All the other OS's are either toys (Vista and Etch) or needed for certain non-linux compatible things (XP Pro).

Anyways, back to my original question... If I install Etch, will I be able to mount my /home partition I use for Sarge? Or will there be some conflicts. It's not really a problem with Etch having its own /home directory - i will just let it build on on the / partition of Etch and i can mount Srage's /home on /mnt/home as so not have conflicts with apps but still be able to use it.

Also... How would you recommend me spreading out my hard drive space to each OS ? This is my current setup (give or take a few gigs here and there):

Swap = 1gb
Sarge = 10gb
/home (sarge) = 30gb
/var/www (sarge) = 10gb
Testing = 10gb
XP = 15gb
Vista = 20gb

Thanks!

You will probably run into small problems with differences in config files.

Maybe you can duplicate users like user-sarge , user-etch No that's not awful

otherwise as dracae said you might get config problems.

I run sarge in a chroot (to run them at the same time) and have put a line in inittab so that when I switch to ttyX , I have a beautiful sarge login while on tty1 I have sid running.

my /chroot/home is a mount-bind on /home

cant you just edit your etch's fstab and put in there so it mounts the sarge partition on some etch directory when it boots up?
like:
/dev/hda3 /mnt/sargeHome ext3 default 1 1
or whatever the syntax is for it

Yes I think this has the same effect.
Maybe (r)bind is more performant (it act on VFS layer).
If I unmount my real home, the chrooted home will get unmounted, not with your example.
With bind I don't need to put permission/options, they are the same if not specified.