I have a 160 GB HDD which I"d like to install a multiboot Linux system
they are Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, Red Hat, Ubuntu and CentOS, not necessary in that order. I want to keep some space for bata.
Not Windows at all.
I'd appreciate your help.
Raulmcsr

That is a lot of alternatives.

Partition for each, 20GB should be enough for root. I suggest a different disk for your home directory.

The real issue is going to be grub2. I haven't figured it out yet for multi-booting different distributions. It was easy with grub legacy, I just used a single shared /boot filesystem. It should still be possible, but you would want to use only one of the distributions to apply updates to the menu. Grub2 has so many different sources of data...

If your systems supports it then you might consider GPT partitioning.

What's the problem? You would first need to decide if you are going to use UEFI/GPT or just the old MBR. With the old MBR method, just install the first OS and make sure you install Grub to the MBR. Reboot to test. You can then repeat that process and reboot to test the next operating system(s) or install Grub to the root partition of subsequent installs and then update grub from the first OS you installed. I have or have had all these systems installed without problems except for Red Hat, used CentOS. UEFI installs will be different and you'll need to do some reading on that.

Hi.

I normally install GRUB2 (to MBR on my T420) with the first OS, then skip when installing the others and then run:from the first OS again.

Have fun!

A very simple and effective alternative is to use virtual machines, hosted by "your operating-system of choice."

VirtualBox, which is absolutely free, yet backed by Oracle Corporation (yes, the "gigantic database" people ...), does an excellent job of virtualization and runs on a variety of hosts.

It bears remembering that, "in the cloud," most of the systems that you will encounter these days are virtual.

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Xen works fairly well too. The usual problem is that the peripherals don't get passed to the virtual machine (audio, video acceleration, USB...) very well. Video acceleration was my basic problem. It was all software.

As you can see there are a lot of ideas. It more boils down to your testing. Linux is pretty good now on how it allows one to install multi distro's. Most installers will correctly view the situation but in the end you may have to be creative with partitions and loaders and maybe chainloading.

At one time there used to be a few programs that would run on start up to help manage multiple OS installations. I haven't used them in a very long time but they are still around. They can sometimes assist you in loading and running 100 or more OS's from a menu at boot.