hi,
can i install more then one distribution on one drive?
i want to install fedora and ubuntu on partion of hard disk bz i dont have much space. is it possible and how can i do it?

Yes you could, but it of course depends on how little space we are talking.

IGF

You can install several partitions onto one harddisk, basically the only limit I can think of is the number of partitions (primary and logical) you can create, which is typically larger than what you would need. There was a thread about installing two distributions on the same partition, and though I don't know if it's really impossible, it's probably impractical - you would need to somehow "mask" the operating systems to think they sit on their separate root filesystems though they don't. Practically your easiest way to have several operating systems on one harddisk is to put them onto separate partitions. You can share some partitions (not root) between the distributions - at least swap and home partitions, if nothing else - to spare space (and to share your personal files among them all), but the root partitions are probably best made their own.

The process is basically as easy as partitioning your disk so that you have enough partitions (for example one for swap, one for /home and two for roots, one for each operating system if you want dual-boot) and then just installing the operating systems one by one, making sure in the setup that you choose to install them onto their own partitions (and mount home partition under /home and swap partition for swap). In some cases you could just install the operating systems and instead of manual partitioning ask the setup to automatically resize existing partitions and use the free space, but in my opinion it's just easier to partition beforehand.

Lack of space is a bad thing; it wouldn't help you much to install two distributions on the same partition (if it was possible), because they would still need certain amount of free space to succeed - you could just as well make separate partitions and make them just big enough to fit the operating systems' root partitions there (and share /home and swap between the operating systems). Problem is, of course, that if the root partition is too small and it fills up, you end up with problems when booting or running the system.

You can have (as far as I know) four "primary" partitions, but if you choose to do so you can make three primary partitions + lots of logical partitions (the logical partitions go into the place of the fourth primary one, if you like to think it like that). Linux doesn't "care" whether it's installed onto a primary or logical partition, it will boot nevertheless if the bootloader works.

As the last thing I'd like to say that with the harddisk prices of today your easiest way out of this would be to spend a small sum of money and buy a new harddisk to put your new operating system on. Since several hundred gigabytes disks are today usual stuff and thus not mind-boggingly expensive anymore (even bigger ones are, or are about to come, around), you can easily buy a "small" disk of 100GB or less for a smallish sum of money, and because you can share your home partition between different distributions, you don't need that big a drive anyway (root partition doesn't grow to 100GB on normal usage, if /home is on a separate partition). Or you could buy a new drive to put your /home on and use the older one to host the root partitions. Your choice..

Hello, I have a similar dilemma about whether or not to install multiple Linux OSes on the same computer.

I want to try several distros (E.g. Ubuntu 8.04, Medibuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE) in the next few weeks, and I am thinking of sharing a home folder between all the distros. However, I think I read somewhere that it is not a good idea to do this since different program versions use different formats for their configuration files (or something along those lines) -- it was an article about removing the contents of /home before upgrading an Ubuntu installation.

Is this true? Or is it safe to go ahead and share my /home partition between the distros (so that I can work on my text documents, downloads, etc from all the installed distros)?

No matter, a good answer and solution is here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...istros-560166/