hi, all

this is my "maiden voyage" in linuxquestions.org. but i'm a retired senior.

i started with linux a little over a year ago using the linspire distro, which basically is "linux for dummies". ok, i guess, to get your feet wet but it doesn't teach you much about linux.

anyway, i just bought a presario r4225ca laptop. very affordable and very powerful--amd athalon 64 bit chip, 1gb ram, 100gb hd, etc.

i'd like to get rid of winxp completely but since i want to use partitionmagic 8.0 to partition the hd for 4 different linux distros and am not familiar enough with the linux command line, i uninstalled as much of the winxp as i could and then installed pm.

i've partitioned the hd into 3 primary partitions--winxp (11gb), a small win backup (1.5gb), an 83gb extended. the last is divided into 10 logical partitions--a small fat32 (500mb), 4 lin ext3's, 4 lin swaps (1gb preceding each distro) and one lin backup (3gb) at the very end. if you see anything wrong with this setup let me know.

i've also installed the pm bootmagic software to select and boot each os at startup.

i'm stumped now as to how to proceed with the installation of each of the 4 linux distros. you have to set the partition for each "active" before installing one at a time. and the only way it seems you can do this is to pick a task called "install another os", which then asks you to make a new partition, not select one that's already been created. they say only primary partitions can be set to "active", yet also say linux must be installed only on logical partitions--which is the way i've set things up.

any ideas?

thanks for any help you can provide.

simonsays

Why not use grub as your loader ???. Works fine in this scenario.
If you want an open alternative to bootmagic (seen too many issues with this here on LQ) have a look at gag. Offers a load menu, and you just install each new ditros boot-loader to that distros root partition (never MBR - gag handles that).

Linux doesn't need (or use) the boot flag. In fact, if you don't use M$ofts lame boot-loader, neither does XP. Best solution is to leave (only) the XP partition "active". This allows the XP install CD to boot if you ever need to.

Also you only really need the one swap partition - but if you have the space, one each is fine. Doing it as you have allows you to use suspend2 - it saves the state data to swap.