Installing 3 distros on 80 gig HD

Echo Kilo · 03-11-2005, 03:24 AM

What would you reccomend for HD partitioning 3 distros on a 80 gig HD?

I'd like to try 3 distros, but don't know how to partition it properly. Does the SWAP have to be a primary partition? What about Home?

Can I do it like this:

Distro 1 Kernel - Primary 1
Distro 1 Swap - Extended
Distro 1 /Home - Extended

Distro 2 Kernel - Primary 2
Distro 2 Swap - Extended

Distro 3 Kernel - Primary 3
Distro 3 Swap - Extended

druuna · 03-11-2005, 03:34 AM

Hi,

About swap:

You only need one swap partition for all the distro's you install. Swap is a 'scratch partition', which is cleared/cleaned with every boot (not entirely correct, but this will do for now).

Although I have it as a primary partiton, this is not necessary.

I see /home only once in the above example, are you planning to use it for all 3 distro's? If so you need to take some precautions:

- Make sure user/group ID's are the same in all distro's (as you probably know users/groups are represented by numbers and names are looked up according to these numbers).

It would be advisible to place / (or /boot if they are seperate partitions) on primary partitions.

Hope this helps.

reddazz · 03-11-2005, 03:39 AM

You can use one swap parttion for all your distros. I tend to create one or two primary partitions and an extended partition, because Linux will work fine even if its not installed on a primary partition.

oneandoneis2 · 03-11-2005, 03:46 AM

Make one /boot partition and stick all the kernels in it - in fact, you can have just one kernel for all the distros unless you have a particular need for them to be different.

I find Grub to be a better bootloader than Lilo for multi-distro systems, as its files live on /boot, and it's easy to share /boot with all distros.

Echo Kilo · 03-11-2005, 01:28 PM

THanks! So what exactly would the partition table look like If I put each distro's /boot on a primary partition put the swap on the final partition?

I'm not sure how to use one kernel and point all three distro's to the same kernel. That sounds interesting, but maybe over my head.

oneandoneis2 · 03-11-2005, 02:57 PM

Well, FWIW, this is mine:

Code:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1           6       48163+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2               7          37      249007+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3              38        6117    48837600    5  Extended
/dev/hda5              38         645     4883728+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6             646        1253     4883728+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7            1254        3685    19535008+  83  Linux
/dev/hda8            3686        6117    19535008+  83  Linux

where:
1 is /boot
2 is swap
5 is my Slackware distro
6 is my /home partition
7 is a partition for dumping excess big stuff

and 8 is my Gentoo install

It's easy to point the distros at the same kernel - it's the bootloader that decides what kernel to use, and if /boot is shared, you just put the same entry for each distro.