I am building a dream computer running only Linux. I am putting two 300 GB drives and intend to have my main distro on hda with a separate partition for /home. On the second hard drive I want to install other distros. Since I have a separate partition for /home, I will be able to mount it on the other drisos. My question is this:

A while back some of the distros (FC2, in particular) had problems dual booting with Windows. Is this a problem for dual booting with Linux distros? When I install other distros, do I install the bootloader again or is there another process when Linux distros are involved?

Any info on this would be helpful as I got conflicting answers on google and irc.

The problems related to dual booting with Linux/Windows probably won't exist when dual booting Linux/Linux. But you may encounter new problems.

I've had experience getting more than one Linux distro on my computer (plus Windows). Right now I have Window, Gentoo Linux, and Yoper Linux all on my two drives (a 40G and a 120G). I have room for more in the future.

The first difficult thing may be to convince whatever distro that you're using that you DON'T want to install a bootloader. Most installs assume that you want to install a boot loader and are hard to get out of that mode. But usually, you'll have some kind of option not to install a boot loader. Obviously you want to install the bootloader when you install your first distro, but after that, don't install a bootloader anymore. Just add the appropriate options that the other distro needs to your already-existing bootloader...this brings me to difficulty number 2...

You want to know what all the options are for boot the particular kernel that the distro needs. For example, after I had Gentoo installed, I installed Yoper. I didn't install the bootloader so I never knew the correct kernel parameters that I needed to add to my bootloader. So I had to install Yoper again and tell it to install the bootloader. Then I copied all the kernel parameters that I needed from it's grub.conf file, put it in the one for Gentoo, and then had to reinstall Gentoo's bootloader back into the MBR. Kind of a headache, but without doing that I wouldn't have known exactly how Yoper needs to start its kernel.


As far as sharing a partition between the two distros, no problem. Just add the partition and where to mount it in /etc/fstab for each distro. I'm sharing a partition that has all my music files on it between my two Linux distros. I mount it in /usr/media/ogg-vorbis for each distro. You'll have to do this manually for each distro (the install won't know to do this). Also make sure that "auto" is in your /etc/fstab options so it gets mounted on boot (I believe that's the option you need to check). The permissions and whatnot for each file will be retained. Since you're sharing /home for each distro, you're going to have to create the same users in each distro. The name of the user and the groups that the user belongs to will have to be repeated in each distro. Other than that, you shouldn't have a problem.

Hope that helps a bit. SOrry if this response was too lengthy.

-- the dudeman

I have a question with regards to this discussion ....

I place doubt on sharing partitions ....ofcourse, it may be working well for other partitions, but how is the swap partition going to be differentiated ?

Is it really necessary tro create differnet swap partitions for every distribution, or can we use the same swap partition for difernet distribtuions (because after all, the size of our RAM is going to remain same whatever distribtuion we are currently working upon, and moreover, only one distribution is going to be accessed at a time ).......

Swap partitioninig may not be very straightforward and is infact an issue when dealing with multiple UNIX based systems .....include solaris even ...


Can someone answer that point ?

Regards.

Again, I haven't had a problem with this. Most distributions will detect a SWAP partition on your drive and use it by default (unless you want to change it). I've installed many distros and they've all done that. Even KNOPPIX will use your SWAP partition if it detects it. I don't think you should have a problem in that area.

Supposing you do, or you suspect that you will, here's a little snippit from the Partition HOWTO (assuming that hda5 is your swap partition)
(http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Partition.html)
You'll have to read up a little more on the mkswap command so it does what you want. You'd also have to tell the distro installer that you don't want a swap partition. I don't think you can actually do that with many installers (as they automatically use the swap partition you already have), but if the installer is not going to use the SWAP already there, I would guess that you could get away with not having it use one at all, and then manually setting it up later.

Again, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO ANY OF THIS!

Here's how mine's setup:

hda1 --- FAT32/Windows XP --- ~10G
hda2 --- Ext2/Gentoo /boot --- ~32M
hda3 --- SWAP/Linux Swap --- ~700M
hda4 --- Ext3/Gentoo / --- ~27G

hdb1 --- Ext2/Yoper /boot --- ~32M
hdb2 --- Ext3/Yoper / --- ~18G
hdb3 --- Ext3/Music files /usr/media/ --- ~10G

Notice only one SWAP partition (hda3). Yoper detected and used it when I installed it.

I could actually (and probably should) have both /boot directory for Yoper and Gentoo mounted on the same partition. I just didn't think of that when I installed Yoper, so now I have a tiny partition that I don't really "need".

-- the dudeman

very usefull information. It will come in quite handy when I put the other distros in.