hi-

i boot into windows or suse using grub.
i was just reading an article on virtualization and partitions.
the author mentioned doing development on different partitions.

in a win environment, to test and development with partitions
would require more than one copy of an os installed i believe.
the environment variables need to be separate for testing.
i am planning on getting a new sata150 drive soon. drives
are big these days.

i usually set up linux
with a fat32 so i can save to windows, a swap, and a root.
can i duplicate that like 2 different [fat32's,swaps,and roots].
if i already partitioned it in advance using partition magic
can i just in yast under "expert partitions" just select the swap
fat32 and root for each different linux system i want?
install on the first 3 and then go back in and install
on the second 3 (fat32,swap,root)?
i.e. i want to have one where i develop and one where i deploy
that doesnt have the development settings so i can see
how my application will function on a non-development machine.

i want to have different environments for like java and
the tcl/tk languages. since i am not storing music and
dvd's why not use all of this extra space from these
BIG drives? i could have each partition set double -
one partition set for java + tcl development and one partition
set for java + tcl deploy.

i am not sure this will work. please let me know.
it will be cool if i can do it. for a few years now i have
had to go to someone elses computers to test my projects.
and of course it never goes 100% smooth.

thanks,
jim

Fat32 is the worst filesystem to install linux on. It doesn't save the uid/gid and permission attributes of files. For SuSE, there is an option to install to a directory. You don't need separate swap partitions. You can even use the same /home partition among different installations. Just give each home directory a different name to reduce conflicts with the ~/.kde/ and other settings.

One potential conflict is that different distro's may use a different range of UIDs for regular users. Mandriva starts at 500 while SuSE starts at 1000. This can be changed in /etc/login.defs if you want the same UID range used. So if you have the same UID in different distro's you can share files easily.

Hi -

i only had the fat32 partition to save important data on.
that way i could back up files in windows without having to backup data once for SUSE and once for Windows.

i dont think i will use differnet distros (just SUSE) but that is intersting about the UID for different distros.

ok re: the swap and home partition. thanks.

i dont follow this: "For SuSE, there is an option to install to a directory"???? do you mean in yast i can pick the partition to install the o/s root partition / to ????

i assume i need separate / (root) partitions if i want different settings to develop and test then. is that correct?

thanks very much for helping,
jim

Hi,

Let me see if I get this straight. You want to triple boot with a windows install, and two suse linux installs? I think that's doable.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you'll need one swap partition for each suse install - unless you intend to use hibernation. Since, except in the case of hibernation, the swap partition data becomes irrelevant after each shutdown/reboot.

You'll also only need one fat32 partition (or you can install 'ntfs-3g' for linux, and safely write directly onto a windows ntfs partition).

You can install suse a second time, by re-running its install disk, and making a new partition that it will know as its root. Then have it mount the root of the first suse install as something like /media/suseA.

Then in the first suse install, you can tell it to mount the new suse's root partition as /media/suseB

Here's an example partition scheme:

/dev/sda1 --> C: NTFS (windows) (primary partition)
/dev/sda2 --> / ext3 (SUSE install A) (primary partition)
/dev/sda3 --> / ext3 (SUSE install B) (primary partition)
/dev/sda5 --> Swap (Linux) (logical partition)
/dev/sda6 --> D: Fat32 (Shared - Optional) (logical partition)

Of course, as I said earlier, suse A won't see sda3 as a root partition, but as /media/suseB, or something like that. And vice-versa.

A little advice: If you have a second hard disk, you can add swap partitions there to speed up your swap memory access. Remember, swap partitions should not exceed 1gb, and I don't think they CAN exceed 2gb.

Hope this helps (and I hope I'm right about it),
Sam

You can find the install into directory if you go to yast. I think it is intended more for using zen, but it is an option. You could try a test minimal install and then look how the /<dir>/etc/fstab file looks like. It could be that the first root (/) partition is mounted. I don't know if you would need to chroot the directory or something similar. The directory could be a mounted partition. That would allow you to install SuSE there while running SuSE.

Use kdar or tar to backup the linux files to a fat32 partition. Otherwise you will loose the permissions. Remember the 2GB limit for file sizes. I once piped the output of tar through split to backup my home directory to a fat32 external drive. You can restore like: cat /mnt/externaldrive/filename.tar.gz.??? | tar xvzf -
So you don't need to join the parts before using tar to extract them. If you use kdar, you can set the slice size.

hi -
thanks. i really like the tips about ntfs-3g and how to
back up to fat32 (with 2gb file size limits).
i will print all of this information and think it over
some more. i have a few other options possibly and i will
think it all over. this really helped.

thanks,
jim