How many distros can I install on one 200 Gig HDD? I want to put on Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva, and Slackware. Then leave some space for any new distro I might want to check out. I may also put Debian on here too, just because it's one of those distros that sounds innovative. I am doing this purely for practice as a newbie, install something multiple times, make it stick. Is it one of those "install until you run out of space" things, or is there a limit? 2.8 GHz P4, 1Gig RAM, so BIOS wont give me any problems. Is there any recommended order? Does LILO accept more OS's than GRUB? I just don't want this HDD to blowout, mailorder takes too long for that.

hmm.. interesting strategy. might work. with a 200GB harddrive you couold install as many as you want really. I believe there is some max that the boot loader can handle which is 64 i think. That will more likely be your limit(not a harddrive blowout). and if you are just doing for practice you could just keep installing over the old distro. If you are doing this i might suggest installing them in order of difficulty. Ubuntu is by far the easiest so do that first. Maybe add gentoo at the end. However if you really want to learn you should install one and the make your way through LFS. if you do that you will learn just about everything there is in a linux install. You get to build the entire thing from scratch.

As many as you want probably. Definatly enough for those three and plenty more. Space shouldn't really be a problem. Though I'd doubt you'd really want that many at one time anyway.

If you use a common /home partition, you could make it quite large and use it for all of the distros. The easiest way to do it is to have individual home directories for each distribution, such as argylesuse, argylefc, etc. Editing your /etc/passwd file, you could use the name "argyle" and have the home directory have the distro suffix. This can reduce the amount of drive space each distro would take up.