What do I need to do to be able to boot into either Open SUSE or Ubuntu? I already have Ubuntu installed - and that's the only operating system on the drive. I can't remember exactly how I set up partitions. I want to try out SUSE and have the choice of booting into that one, but I can't risk messing up my Ubuntu install.

Could someone help me get started with some tips or best practices? I'll back everything up of course, but besides that, not sure where to start.

Thanks in advance,
Eric

From a command shell in Ubuntu, can you post the output of the command: fdisk -l, which would tell us about your hard drive configuration.
If all you have is Ubuntu with a swap and home partition, you should download, burn, and use Gparted which is only about 45+ megabytes to create some free space for Suse. Gparted is a partition manipulator.
The swap partition can be used by both. You can share the home partition also, but you should create a different user name to avoid corrupt user settings and access either account as root without issues.
Go through the SUSE installation and select the newly created free space for the root (/) partition.
Once you are happy with your dual boot setup, back up the important partitions, then tweak them, re-install a copy/copies from backup when things go wrong, and keep on tweakin'.

OpenSUSE 10.3 has an intelligent installer - it is capable of repartitioning your existing system for a dual boot. Just read everything carefully.

The actual GRUB menu will end up being OpenSUSE's version. If you want to keep the Ubuntu grub.lst (i.e. so it will be automatically updated wih new kernels), it will be best to tell SUSE to install GRUB to the SUSE partition and write an entry in Ubuntu's menu.lst to chainload SUSE.

If your box has the "horsepower", mainly RAM, you could install Xen (2x free) or vmserver (0-cost only), & run SuSE as a VM in Ubuntu.

If for lack of resources or other good reason, you still prefer dual-boot, Simon makes excellent sense (as usual ).

The fdisk -l command returns:


If I understood you guys correctly, when I begin the install, I can use /dev/sda1 as the swap for SUSE too, and then split sda2 into two partitions?

Should I only make the third partition just large enough for Suse and then use sda2 again for my personal files?