Install several distros on one machine
 

Hei
I am thinking about installing 2 or 3 distros on on laptop.

I think I install the first one, partioning and format only a part of the harddrive and then afterward install another on the rest of the harddrive.

Would the bootloader then discover both distros ??

Is there a smart way of doing this ?

The bootloader only knows what it's configuration file tells it. Grub uses /boot/grub/menu.lst and Lilo uses /etc/lilo.conf, some distros include GUI tools that will let you set these up and some have some form of auto-detection, the bootloader itself doesn't do this.

Depends on the installer as to whether or not it looks for other distros. No real problem though, what I do for each new distro I install (and I havea few running) is to create symbolic lings in each /boot to the kernel image (typically vmlinuz) and initrd, and manually add the new distro to the grub menu that I installed with the first distr0. This means that I have to add 4 lines each time.

Title new distro
root (hd0,7)
kernel (hd0,7)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb8 ro
initrd (hd0,7)/boot/initrd

or similar. Easy.

that said, if the second you chose to install was ubuntu for ewxample, it would find the other distros. Issue always will be what happens when you update the "other" distro. This is where my scheme works. Each time I install a new kernel, I just update the links and the bootloader will just work.

In my opinion it depends on the distros you use Suse for instance stated that during installation she try to put the other distro in the boot loader too Yesterday I install Mandriva 2008 spring even my other distro who are on different drives she automaticly put suse an Fedora 8 and windows in the boot loader

In my case it works

all the best

Hei
Is it possible to share HOME. Let say I mount HOME to one partition.

Hei
This looks good. I am considering Mandriva, OpenSuse and Kubuntu.
Could work right out of the box all of them an I dont need to do anything with the bootloader !?

Of course, though it would be advisable to use a different username for each distro, just to keep configuration conflicts to a minimum.

For example:
icebear-mandriva
icebear-suse
icebear-kubuntu

That way each user has a different directory in /home/