Hi everyone,

I have an 80GB SATA Hard Drive and just want to experiment around with a lot of different Linux distro's. I know its usually better to just try one at a time, but I will probably be keeping all 5 on the drive. I have one other 80GB Drive which only has Debian on it and it is my main drive. I do not want to put any other distros on it. It currently uses GRUB to load and I need to make sure it stays as the main GRUB bootloading drive.

I dont plan on downloading a lot of stuff for the 6 distros so hard disk space is not a problem

My 5 distros are:
Slackware
SUSE
Fedora Core
Ubuntu
Mandriva

So my question is, how should I partition the drive for all of this. Because clearly I cant just do the automatic/guided for each one because theyll just overwrite each other. Should i use cfdisk beforehand to partition equal amounts for each distro? I could probably use Slackware to do this, correct?

And for each one, should I just say no bootloader?

Thank you

I have just such a setup at home also. I use 10GB per distro, a shared 512MB swap partition, and a /shared partition for documents/media/etc that I want access to in all the distros.

As to bootloader, don't say no, but do say no to the MBR. Install each bootloader to the / partition of each distro. Then you can just chainload it with the Debian grub.

Slackware will indeed give you the ability to partition your drive and yes, you will have to choose the manual partition option for each distro as you install them.

You will only need one swap partition and one home partition for all five distros (or you could use the /swap and /home already on your first drive but if your experimenting....).

I wouldn't bother with exotic partition schemes such as separate /temp, /var etc. I've done that in the past and it's a pain. I suggest you just create a / partition for each individual distro.

So you'd have:

/Slackware
/Suse
/Fedora Core
/Ubuntu
/Mandriva
/swap
/home

The size of the partitions is pretty much up to you. /swap is usually about twice the physical RAM but no more than 2 gig.

Don't let any of the installers overwrite your bootloader or you could lose the ability to boot those distros already installed. It's a piece of cake to edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst manually to load the new distros.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: pljvaldez, I wish I could type quicker LOL

Ok thank you both for the reply! How do I specify that the home directory should just be that one partition, and not a separate home directory for each distro? Also how do I tell them all to use the same SWAP partition?

Thanks

Usually I'm the one slow to the post!

Just a personal experience note from me, I've not had much success using a shared /home partition. Each distro typically uses slightly different versions of KDE, Gnome, etc and my config files in /home got really borked up across distros.

I'm sure other people have figured out how to do it without screwing it up, but it was easier for me to just dump docs to a common partition via a symlink in /home and let each distro have it's own /home inside /.

Just my

Alright, Ill try a couple with shared home directories (after all, it is an experiment ) and then do some others with their own. Any ideas on assigning the same swap for each distro?

Thanks again guys

You just do that during the manual partitioning. Just select the same partition each time and mark it as swap. It'll probably get reformatted as swap each time, but it doesn't matter...