HOWTO: install multiple distro's onto same primary drive
 

I want to put several different linux distro's on the same workstation.

Q1. How do I partition for multiple distro's?
Q2. How do I manage GRUB2 for multiple distro's?

I'm stumped to discover how to deploy more than one or two distro's per drive regardless of the drive capacity.

The legacy workstation has a primary disk drive typically /dev/sda*. The partitioning rules allow for a total of four(4) primary partitions. One of those primary partitions might be an "extended" partition, and those can provide additional "logical" partitions. The linux convention assigns sda1-sda4 to the primary partitions with sda5-up for logical partitions.

One approach to partitions and linux install looks something like this:
This partition plan allows for dual-boot with M$ Windows(tm) and a bootable Vendor supplied rescue/recovery application.

Thanks in advance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

I don't understand what the problem is? Each install needs at least one partition to itself. So yes, partition the disk into multiple partitions, one per OS plus one for swap, minimum. As far as I know, Linux can boot from an extended partition. And Grub2 should automatically find the installed OSes and add them to the list.

I need one swap and one $HOME. They could be primary partitions. That leaves one other primary partition and an extended partition.

The other primary partition could be /wrk or /data or whatever -- or simply fold this space into $HOME.

It probably doesn't make sense to have a /boot partition -- leave that in the per-distro folder tree.

I could then slice the extended partition into root-file systems for each distro.
What would be a reasonable amount of space for a distro "/" tree given that it will hold not only the distro software but also /var and /boot? Analysis of my current workstations says that 12-16 GiB are used... but I don't spend a lot of time trimming distro fat and I also add a lot of my own trinkets and toys.

Now what do I do with GRUB-2 and its parts? Will update-grub or its equivalent see all of those viable distro's scattered across the drive?

Thanks in advance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

You need only one swap partition for all your distros. Most of linux distros work just as well from logical partitions as primary. You can save your primary for any windows or if not there are a couple of unix distros that want to use primay distros. I usually use two partitions for each distro one / and one /home and they all share the same swap partition. The extended partition will holds the logical partitions. Grub2 is pretty good about finding the other distros.

My primary distro is on a 12 gig root partition with a 10 gig home. It is fat in the root a little 6 gig used. My home is 10 gig with about 2 gig used. The rest I put on single 12 gig partitions except for two that are 4 gig reserved for the small distros. I have 250 gig partition for my data for all the distros.
If you install the distro using grub2 last using default grub install it should do everything for you.