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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.
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.
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.
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.
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