Trying 8-10 Distros on one Hard Disk
 

I bought an 80 gig Hard Drive so that I can partition my Hard Drive and try numerous distros.

How should the partitions be setup for this test environment?

Try the following link. You need to read a good tutorial before you start.

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplan...orials/3174/1/

Have fun

I think that the link is too out-of-date:

Anywhay, if what you want is to test different distros, I don't think you want to test them all at the same time or to really WORK with them. Just create a couple (literally 2) of 5Gb partitions where to install. The rest of the harddisk can be devoted to your "primary" distribution (the one you will be actually using) and swap.

I've 40Gb of harddisk: 30 with Knoppix (so far the distribution I use the most) and SWAP, and 2 partitions of 5Gb where, in this moment, I've installed Gentoo and Slackware for testing, but I've also tried Debian and SuSE.

Hope it will be useful...

So what would be the partition table if I wanted to install 8 distros? THis is mostly to compare how they each install.

Same thing here... Only I'm getting 200GB this friday. Right now i have 100GB (REALLY NOISY!!! it's like it's been wrecked or something...), and after reading a lot of HOWTO's and posting a thread, I got a partition table with 10 linuxes and even fitted in a Solaris!!! But hey, after thinking normally: why? Why do you need THAT MANY? Now that I'm getting 200, i can have 15 (!) at least, but I'm just not gonna do it, cuz there is no point in it.

Here's my advice though: Pick about 5 distros you're definitely gonna try, make a huge one for Mandrake (since it's your main distro for now) and about 5-7 GB for the other 4 or 5 distros. I started a thread on this forum with a question of space per distro. And if you have your /home partition mounted as another partion (like a special /home for every distro), you won't get more than 7GB per distro. I assume that you have to remove all the source files after the installation too.

Anyways, this won't be hard (i hope) or confusing. I mean, maybe there is a point to having a lot of distros, but at some points you're gonna see that one of them doesn't have something you need or it just doesn't work right for you, so you're gonna have to format it and install another one.

But this is just advice, it's how i am going to do my partitioning. The other reason is the bootloader, which you will have to edit each time you install a distro. If you have 8-10 distros installed, i think you'll get confused...

hope i helped you,
svinka

svinka, that's excellent advice.

Can you show me your patition table?

Did you partition before doing the installs or as you installed each distro?

Are you using the same /home partition for every distro?

Thanks!

Yes I will show you my partition table, only i haven't got my new drive yet, but i will show you haw it WILL look like.
I had similar table, only the hard drive was 100 gigs.
Yes, the one i have now and this one(the new one) i did and i will partition before a single install (from knoppix is the best, using QTParted).
Yes, and cuz for "some" reasons i still have to have XP (although i don't like it anymore) i added 3 (!) partitions that linux-only user doesn't need. Anyways, look at my table:

Windows XP Professional 10000 P
SuSE Linux 9.2 Prof 7000 P
* Just a swap partition 2000 P
ASP Linux v10.0 7000
ALT Linux Junior 2.3 7000
Mandrake Oficial 10.1 7000
Debian 7000
Knoppix 5000
* Shared Storage 68000
* /home for linuxes 69000
* Backup ghost image 11000

This is the EXACT order (well, the distros are the only one's that can change, but everything else is how it's supposed to be) P means Primary, so everything else is logical. Notice the FAT32 shared storage, ghost backup partition for WinXP, and the WinXP itself. Probably I won't make it THAT big, i mean if i'll use it, only like once in two months... So, as you noticed, SuSE is the only distro i have as primary (cuz for now it's my only distro, and i'm kinda used to it...) The other distros were picked by me randomly, exept for ASP and knoppix, which i had to try out. Remember, if a ingle one of them doesn't work for me, formatting will make the partition ready for the next distro...

Anyways, even if all the distros work great, i can pick the ones that i'll definately use (like 3-4, otherwise too much rebooting) the rest go formatted, and new one's go installed. But that's only in case you just wanna try out every one you see (like me).

In the end, i'll give you a suggestion on your partition table if you don't have windows:

Primary Linux not less than 7GB P
SWAP depends P #you probably know that this works for all lin's
/home big, but not really huge... depends on your hard drive too P
The rest are the other distros on the extended partition, and you can have up to 64 (!) of those.

If you have any questions, i will answer anytime.
Hope this helped,
svinka.

Echo Kilo, I have everything working. Well, I still have to install 3 distros, but the three that I already have installed work perfectly. Don't even know why I need to install them, but hey, I might need them...
What I like about SuSE is its ease. Sometimes it's just too much, but mostly, it makes you feel on the right track (again, not always), but ASP and ALT (the other two I have, both russian :-D) are not bad also. Anyways, all I wanted to say, is that it's really easy to configure bootloader with YaST. BUT, you can configure GRUB and LILO yourself. There are a lot of Howtos based on LILO, but here's my GRUB sample, if you need it:

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SUSE LINUX 9.2
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 vga=0x314 selinux=0 splash=silent resume=/dev/hda3 desktop elevator=as showopts
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title ALT Linux
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title ASP Linux
root (hd0,4)
chainloader +1


So, you can see, that its very simple (don't know about those comments, though...) You just add a chainloader +1 to that partition. An attempt to load a distro directly from image on that partition resulted in failure, so don't even try it. This really might be confusing, with bootloader after bootloader, but it's better than nothin'.

Well, hope it helped, if you have any questions, i'll try to help.
svinka.

How about using Vmware?

I use VMware and it works pretty well ;)

Yeah, tried that, but i actually need the experience of setting up the boot-loaders to work perfectly, and lots of free memory for each distro (i have only DDR333 512MB! C'mon, to run VMware perfectly you have to have at least a gig of DDR400) I already have three distros installed and already found a conflict with boot-loaders. It seems that ALT insists on rewriting MBR and there's nothing to do with it. Ok, so i use ALT's lilo instead of SuSE's grub, big deal. Yast has nice boot configuration tool, but at it too, by default rewrites MBR. Everything worked fine, but i had to repair SuSE's boot-loader using the first disk. Darn it, once again, i replaced ALT's MBR record with SuSE's. AHH!!! Ok, i made SuSE normal again (on hda2, where it's supposed to be) but there is no option of repairing ALT's system, so i guess i have to reinstall it... well, not a problem (it's a one-cd distro)

Anyways, It is really nice, to get out of that SuSE (not that it's bad or anything) and see "the world" :D

Despite the configuration of the system itself using something ike YaST, ALT is a nice distro too. And it's mainly in english, but supports a lot of languages (including russian)

Next in line is RedHat 9 and Solaris 9 (intel-version). Ready to meet them with cheers :D.

svinka

svinka

IMHO you would be better off sticking to GRUB and declining to use whatever bootloader comes with a particular distro. If you make a GRUB boot floppy you can edit it each time you install a new distro and copy the files to your /boot when you know it works.

Damn!
 

DAMN! I am so frustrated! Everything is messed up, and i guess the only solution is zero-fill the drive (over-night, probably would take 12 hours...) and start fresh and clean... I mean, it's not that bad, but I finally got it, but it's kinda too late, since half of them (distro's ) are not booting, and the other half barely works. Well, at least NOW I know EXACTLY how to configure bootloaders. And yes, my choice is GRUB. At least it worked for me more than 50%.

Well, after writing this stuff down, i think I won't zero-fill it ('cause a single thought of installing XP again is makin' me sick, but believe me, I MUST have it, not for me though). I'll just boot into KNOPPIX and format everything except Win partitions.

Well, it was hard, but I (almost) succeeded. Good luck to all those newbies trying out several distro's on one drive!!

svinka

Okay, I'll just go with 6 linux distro's on the HD. So the question becomes.

How are the partitions set up? Primary, Extended, Logical? I'm a little confused about the way to partition in advance.

Also do I need to handle the bootloader in any special way?

Ok, look. It's not as confusing after you make a table and a chart in Calc :D

Are you planning on having win on your machine? I believe XP doesn't care, but all the previous, including 2000, MUST be on the first primary partition. But anyways, win is more picky nowadays so IF you will have win, make a partition for it on the Primary Master Drive as a Primary partition.

Then you will have a partition for your primary linux (which i assume is Mandrake), and a primary swap. after that, therest is extended which can have up to 64 logical partitions, hence, 64 linux distros :D.

If you don't have win, you might wanna put your primary linux as the first of the first, then the swap, and, you might want to make a /home partition for all the linuxes (the problem is with usernames; i have 7 folders in my /home, which are basically all mine, but from different distros). In fact, you can make a /home on an extended partition (as a logical) in the scenario above, with win. Then you will have the exact same partition table as me.

The whole thing would be different if you had 2 hard drives, and i believe you don't.

If this is still confusing, you can just tell me if you will have win or not, and i can write down your partition table.