Till now I only used Linux for networking purposes like router, firewall, download machine functionality. So I don't really have any experience of using Linux as a work station. Now I decided I want to use it on a daily bases as a work station. In my machine I'll have physically two 320GB hard discs, on one of them I'll install Windows Vista (my girlfriend don't like Linux) and on another I'll install Linux. I like Ubuntu and Fedora Linux distributions and I don't really want to chose among them. So here are my questions:

How do you keep many distributions on 1 box? Should I make many small partitions (like 5 GB) for each distribution and leave the rest of the free disk space in common to all distributions? This is not very practical as I would always have to reboot the machine to choose another distribution from a boot loader list. Is there any other way? How do those people doing this that are changing releases like under ware? Don't they have some work files to worry about?

How do I use different desktop environments under the same distribution? Is there some simple way of switching from say KDE to Gnome and vice-versa ? Is it possible to run KDE application under Gnome desktop and vice-versa?

Best regards,

"How do I use different desktop environments under the same distribution? Is there some simple way of switching from say KDE to Gnome and vice-versa ? Is it possible to run KDE application under Gnome desktop and vice-versa?"

The easiest way is:


cd
nano .xinitrc


and then, add something like:
exec startfluxbox



If you, however, use a display manager like kdm or gdm
this is a little bit more complicated, you must modify it
a bit to add an option to choose which DE or WM to start


You can run kde applications under gnome and vice versa easily.

I checked on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxbox and read that fluxbox is a window manager, but with Fedora and Ubunto there comes 2 window managers GDM and KDM according to the desktop environment (Gnome, KDE). So where does fluxbox come into picture here?
Whe I put this questions I was aiming at explaining how to do it (or atleast giving a direction where to read about it) and not just "it's possible".

Regards,

I read something about window managers and desktops on http://xwinman.org/, but I'm still a bit confused. We have X window on top of which work window manages which control desktops (KDE, Gnome, ...)

So, fluxbox is a window manager. What are then kdm and gdm also window managers or are they desktops?

What are then DE and WM? Desktop environment and Window manager?

Regards,

That seem like a decent way to split thing up and is pretty much what I do. It's possible to have a shared home partition, but since some distros put configuration files slightly different, or may have different versions of a program, it's possible to get things messed up, so I have seperate /home for each of my distros. I'm not really seeing what's so impractical about rebooting. Each distro has things running at the most basic level of the system, so you're not going to be able to switch between them without needing to restart everything.

As for switching bewtween gnome and KDE, I think the answer from shevegen was more confusing by using fluxbox as an example. The same process can be used to start gnome and kde as well.

You quoted the answer, they're display managers. KDM and GDM are what you see when you login using a graphical login. If you click on sessions it will give you option to choose which type or desktop environment you want. It's been a while since I've had multiple environments on the same system, but I thought it detected any that I had installed, so it didn't require any editing. Personally I'd find this the easier way to do it, especially if you think you'll be going back and forth a lot. The method shevegen explained would require you to edit the file every time you want to start a different enviornment.

There's nothing at all you need to know about how to do this, you just run the other app the same way you usually do.

Well, you obviously won't be able to switch from one distribution to another without rebooting - unless you run one inside a virtual machine.

Switching desktops is simply a matter of installing both KDE and Gnome, then logging out of one, selecting a different session and logging in again.

The differences between GDM/KDM, Gnome/KDE and Metacity/Kwin are this:

Gnome/KDE are simply sets of software applications
GDM/KDM are what allow you to run those applications in a GUI
Metacity/Kwin are window managers: they control the behaviour of windows, buttons, etc.

Thank you all for your answers. You explained me a lot. I also got additional information from http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...x-clients.html and Wikipedia.

Regards,