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how many distros can i install on one machine and are there any technical difficulties that appear when there are more than one disto on the machine. does it slow the machine down?
As many as you have the hard drive space for. It's kind of pointless IMO though. Use live disks to test for compatibility with your hardware, use VMs to try out different distros. Multi-booting is just a PITA with no real advantage these days with CPUs that have built in virtualization and cheap RAM that can let you run 4+ VMs at once.
If you have a MBR disk, you can have a max of 6 or 7 partitions per disk. If you have a UEFI BIOS and can use GPT parition tables, you can have (I think) 128 partitions per disk.
You would need at least one partition per distro. You will probably also want a swap partition and a shared /home.
Other than that, it's just a matter of properly configuring your bootloader with all of the proper distros.
If you have a MBR disk, you can have a max of 6 or 7 partitions per disk.
That's not correct.
MBR can have a max of 4 primary partitions, or 3 primary and an extended, and if there is a limit on the number of logical partitions you can put in an extended it's nowhere near 3-4, it's over 100.
No, it does n't slow the machine down, one boot one distro. The limits are from where you put grub and how it is configured.
I don't fully understand this but.., the default install to a hard drive needs (when using mbr)
the use of a small section at the begining of you hard drive but this will become full after reference to say 3 distros but I think you can set a small partition to redirect the boot process to another distro.
Perhaps someone else can fill in the details?
Actually there have been boot managers for decades that could be used to load hundreds of OS's. Things like hiding partitions add to the count and these loaders do it.
The above assumes that you boot clean to an OS.
To be more exact, using a virtual machine you can run almost every OS there is. Emulators exist for systems of almost every hardware.
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