I have been having problems everytime I try to compile applications from there source. So, I wanna try a different Linux distro because Mandrake 10 is getting on my nerves. So, I read good things about Gentoo and that there is no RPM management system mess with things. I've been reading up on the Gentoo Installation Handbook, and have been thinking about how I would partition everything, because I wanna keep my Windows 98 and Mandrake 10 partitions. So, my question is : Is it possible to boot 3 different operating systems? My secong question is: How would I go about setting up the partitions? Thanks for any help.

Yes, you can boot 3 operating systems. You only have to configure GRUB properly to have 3 choices when booting.

Can you be more specific?

I was reading through the Gentoo Installation Handbook, and when I got to the part about partitioning it got complicated. I would have to make 3 different partitions : /boot , a linux swap, and linux native. Well, I would I name the partitions so that they don't interfere with eachother. I don't wanna have to uninstall Mandrake to install Gentoo.

If I remember well, the different distributions can use the same partition swap and /home. That is to say, now you hace Mandrake 10 and it will be partitionated like this: /, swap and home (linux native). When you install Gentoo you won't need to create a partition swap and home for gentoo, you can use the ones you have for Mandrake (all you must do is to select the mount point during the installation). The only new partition is / for Gentoo. And remember that the users can't be the same name in Mandrake and Gentoo (e.g., inline.skater could be for Mandrake and inline.skate for Gentoo).

Resuming; you'll have these partitions:
/ for Mandreake 10
swap for both Mandrake 10 and Gentoo
home for both of them.
/ for Gentoo

Hope it helps!

Uh??

Why can't he have the same usernames???

They can share the same swap partition but it's a bad idea to share /home. I don't see any advantage in having any seperate partitions. Just swap and /

Hi

that wont work properly for him because he has a windows partition.
the maximum number of primary partition is 4.
swap, / , and the windows partition have to be primary.
the only way this works is to give up the partition for your home dir and put it into /.
i guess /boot doesnt need its own partition, youll use grub or lilo anyway

/ for Mandreake
/ for Gentoo
/swap (both can use one)
your Windows

if you have more than one hd, you have much more options.
try to get used to fdisk and partitions, youll need it.

... Let's see my case. In Mandrake my user is Alicia, so there is a /home/alicia/ where lies all the files for this user: config files, temp, programs installed (if you want to install them here, etc). So now if you put Gentoo (or any other) and try to use the same partition, Gentoo will try to create /home/Alicia. And as I guess isn't possible to have 2 files with the same name... So the user in Gentoo should be Ali, Alice or whatever.
Anyway, as I'm a newbie I'm not sure of this (it's just my imagination). So, thanks Andrew Benton and Villain for telling him things clearer (of course there should be a Windows partition). But Villain... swap must be primary? I've installed Mandrake like this: with / as primary, but swap and home are inside an extended partition (Mandrake partitioned itself during the installation).

uh maybe youre right, im sorry
you dont even need a partition, you could have a swap file, thats another possibility

I didn't notice you were talking about sharing the same partition for /home. Anyway, you can always specify a different directory for each user:

Not very useful thou...

So if I was using fdisk to partition all of this, I would mount /mandrake as linux native and mount /gentoo as linux native. Then I would just leave my current swap partition. Is there anything else I would have to do?