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Originally Posted by Gins
How about VmWare? Do you have any experience in VmWare?
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I run VMware guests. The advantages (for me) are that it can run guests headless (I run VMware server), that I can access guests over then network (built-in VNC, VMware GUI, SSH), control resources to use, hibernate guests, allows for snapshots and allows me to attach USB peripherals easily. The downside always is this type of virtualization adds an extra layer of complexity and resource usage as guests share CPU cycles, disk I/O and RAM with the host.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gins
There is a free version of VmWare.
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There is also equivalent OSS like QEmu and VirtualBox. VMware products are not OSS but for me "they just work".
That said I wouldn't suggest using virtualization to avoid having to deal with an elaborate partitioning scheme. If you are not that comfortable partitioning a disk you could use Gparted (they have a Live CD) and visually partition the disk(s)?
If Mandriva, Fedora (the "Core" part was dropped ages ago) and Ubuntu are the only OSes residing on disk then it would be easiest to have your favorite distribution in the primary spot allocating one primary partition for /boot and dumping the other partitions in an extended partition. Then for the other distributions you will just create new partitions in the existing extended partition. This ensures you always have a /boot partition from which you can boot your primary OS and chain-load others.
* To make it easier to install a distribution in the right partitions you could label them in advance. For instance creating "mdkboot", "fhome" and "uvar" partitions makes it easier to pick the right "/boot", "/home" or "/var" from their advanced partitioning tools so you're less likely to make mistakes. (Doesn't mean you shouldn't make backups though!)
