Question about multiple Linux installations
 

I recently installed a large hard drive and am considering installing a couple of other linux distros for testing and just to have some fun. My quesiton is first, is there anything I need to be aware of as far as one installation interfering with another? I had thought about having a common /home directory, but can see some problems that might develop with that including it being difficult to dump an distro.

Thanks for any input. I currently have Mandrake (I refuse to call it Mandriva) 10.1 official and WinXP installed on the system and use GRUB as a bootloader.

stunter

i don't think having common home is a good idea because of authentication majic numbers and incompatable config files due to different versions etc.
I say put each on one partition so they are easily wiped and replaced

You may have problems with boot loaders. You may find it useful to put each distro's bootloader on floppy and entering each subsequent distro manually in the grub menu in the first /boot partition. If you let the installation script install the bootloader, it may clobber previous bootloaders.

If you have a recent machine, you can do most of an installation in less than half an hour. Instead of multiple distros on the drive, you might try them sequentially, installing one at a time. You can always re-install to get back to a previous configuration. Having two distros on the drive at the same time is no particular benefit. After the first two, it gets increasingly difficult just to keep track of the partitions. I find it more useful to keep .iso, database and other files on those big drives.

Thanks for the input. My thought was to keep my current setup (that works pretty well) then try some stuff out. I suppose I could create an .iso of my current layout then go play, trying different stuff out.

I have my current distro on a 10 gig SCSI drive. WinXP is on a 40gig IDE drive (my wife won't let me dump WinXP and it does make a decent game platform). I just installed a 160gig SCSI drive that ultimately will have my linux installation. But before I set that up, I wanted to try both Fedora and Gentoo. Just one at a time installed and try them for a bit. If I like one of them (more than the Mandrake), I'd just install that and move my stuff over from the Mandrake installation then wipe that little 10gig drive and probably pull it (or not; may be a nice place for an archive drive). Anyway, I didn't want to get too clever until I'd had a chance to play with these distros a bit. But, as I'm sure a lot of folks have, I have my current Mandrake installation just the way I want it and don't really want to mess it up.

Dont disturb your old harddisks.. leave them alone.. D/c them and boot the pc, create partitions... install the distro(s) u want and when u finish doing the testing and research, d/c this hard-drive(or just disable it in BIOS) and boot from the previous setup.

Hmmm,

Well, I hate to have to unplug a disk to try this, but I suppose it will be fine. When I get all the CDs burned, guess I can give it a try. Just unplug the power to the disks I want to perserve.

Once I decide on a distro I want to stay with a bit, I can start figuring out how to get stuff over from the Mandrake setup. That should be fun. :mad: