I am going to get a 100gig harddrive. This is how I will partition it...

10gig- swap
20gig- Xandros 3.x OCE
10gig- SuSE 9.1 Personal
10gig- KDE distro
10gig- Gnome distro
10gig- XFCE distro
10gig- IceWM
10gig- Window Maker distro
10gig- Other distro

I want to pick a distro at boot up, using the boot/LILO manager thing that comes with Xandros.

Should I install all those, then install Xandros? The computer has 128mb of memory, should I give each distro 1gig of swap and combine them? Should I split them up?

I have no order I'm going to install these.

I am probably going to use Xandros, SuSE, KDE distro, and the Gnome distro a lot.

Please help me!, ask lots of questions!!

Hi, Colinstu,

In your partition scheme, you really have only two distros listed, Xandros and SuSE. The others are desktop environments or window managers.

You don't need to set aside partition space for the desktop environments and window managers; they're part of the distro. So, if you really want to have both Xandros and SuSE on your hard drive, then you need only some swap space, then a partition for Xandros and another one for SuSE.

The two distros can share the same swap partition.

Within each of the two distros, you'll have a selection of desktop environments and window managers. I don't know what SuSE and Xandros ship with or what's available, but I'm sure you can chose KDE and Gnome and probably the others you've listed, as well. If the others (XFCE, IceWM and Window Maker) don't come with SuSE and Xandros, then you can add them after installation.

It would be good to beef up your RAM if you can; 128 is a little low for the big desktop environments like KDE and Gnome, though IceWM and other window managers will be less greedy.

Traditionally, the rule of thumb has been to have twice as much swap space as you have RAM. So do the math. If you are able to beef up your RAM to 512Mb, for example, then you'd want to have 1 Gb of swap, according to conventional wisdom.

That would leave you a lot of space for your two distros.

So a possible partition layout would be:

30 Gb - Xandros
30 Gb - SuSE
1 Gb - Swap
39 Gb left unformatted for installation of other distros or for expansion of one you have already.

You might get one of the better manuals to guide you. Have fun!

I will have other distros that have those WMs as there main WM. I havn't picked all the distros yet, so I just put what the WM will be. Don't ignore those, I will have a real distro.

If you could only get your hands on more memory, I think you will be much happier with most any distro. Like 500megs if you can, then less swap should be ok. I use about 500 -600 megs of swap.
Xandros is very good at detecting the other distros so, if you want to use that boot loader, install the other distros first. Otherwise, it's a good study lesson to get the boot menu setup manually.

It's clear you're a guy who likes to experiment. But maybe you should stick to one distro first, and then within that distro install a number of desktop environments and window managers. That way you can learn a single distro in depth but, at the same time, enjoy playing around with a lot of different desktop environments and window managers.

For example, if you just install Xandros and opt to install KDE, Gnome, XFCE, IceWM, etc., then you can learn the ins and outs of Xandros, switching window managers or desktop environments as you please.

This is pretty much what I do. I have just one main distro (Slackware), but I do switch around among several window managers, depending on my mood and when I get a little tired of one. I like to tweak the different window managers to suit my fancy.

I also have some extra disk space that I use to sample different distros if I have some extra time. But I don't consider this a work or production distro; just a little space for experimentation. I install and uninstall distros from this space fairly often -- usually once or month or so.

With Knoppix, in the knoppix menu it says "restart X session" or something like that, and it gives me a list of windows managers, you pick one, press OK, it will restart with the selected WM. But Xandros didn't have anything like that. It also didn't say anything about a different WM at startup or when I was installing it. I would have to probably have to download the WM, and go do some hokee process of moving files to dirs that don't exist.

The WMs that I wrote there are pretty good. I never tried Gnome before, and I'm itching my eyes out till I do. Gnome (in my opinion) kinda looks like Mac OS. Replace the Gnome logo w/ an apple, change some menus, and stuff. Put an aqua theme on there, put mac icons, on the right side, put a dock on there, some mac programs, and sell it for a ton of money that is only for mac computers. And done! you got macos.

I do like to experiment. I'm a newbie, and I like to play around with what I like and don't. I remember one WM is so bad, I don't remeber the name. I think it is some where at the end of the list.

My Dad seems to dislike Linux. My mom doesn't care, as long it has internet/email, quicken, saved files, and a good word processor that works w/ her printer- she's all good. I've got here to turn on my computer (w/ xandros) pick Xandros off the boot menu, turn on the internet browser and look at some of here favorite sites, and she also played some games on there. Then I showed her how to turn it off.

I think linux will be a pretty popular OS (making Windows not the best) because the next virsion of windows looks baaaaaad, th whole thing about a winfs or NTFS or whatever sounds very slow, and crashy to me. Everything looks bigger, and nasty. I am really going to use linux if I see that. But my Mom thinks Windows will still go on and take over the world.

The reason why I want multiple distros w/ different WMs is because I want to see different logos, programs, words, options. If I had a Gnome version of SuSE or Xandros it will still have that lizard or X, Yast, Xandros Networks. I want difference.