Hello all,

Here lately I've been using Fedora almost exclusively. Last year I got a good deal on a 500G USB drive, and have another REALLY old computer (we're talking the Original Pentium, math errors and all) with Slackware but it's SOOOO slow.

Now that I have this big USB drive (that works fine), I am wondering if I can use it to install another Linux Distro or 2 (or 3 or 4,ad nauseum), and still have the Fedora install intact. I was really interested in trying Knoppix and Ubuntu. What I'm wondering though, is whether I'll be able to do the installs on the USB drive or not. Will it recognize the drive and allow me to use partitions already there, or do I have to start from scratch (assuming the drive gets recognized BEFORE the install process. I'm also assuming that if all this is possible and goes right without wiping anything important from my normal HD of only 80G).

If anyone has some straight up answers, I'm all ears! And thanks!

Installing to the USB drive may be an option, but IMHO a better way to try different distros is to install Virtualbox (or any other virtualization solution) and install the distros you want to try into separate VMs. This way you haven't to bother with partitioning, putting different bootloaders into the right place or the boot order of your disks.

How much memory came with this Pentium?
Without knowing much about the computer I would say it only has USB 1 ports so running anything from an external drive will much slower then from the internal drive.

There are several lightweight distributions and windows managers. I might try antix, however you would need to use plop on a floppy to boot the CD since I also would say this computer is not capable of booting from a CDROM drive.

www.distrowatch.com

I think the OP says the Pentium is too slow, so he's using the external on the machine he's using now. Using the external is an option, I would make sure to use UUIDs to mount the filesystems, as /dev/sdxX could change the next time it's attached.

First, I'm NOT worried about the old Pentium. AT ALL! It can run Win98 and Slackware, and I'm not fooling with it, I just mentioned it as it runs Slackware. It has NO USB ports, so I can't even use the big drive with it. I DO have a much more modern laptop and run Fedora from it. Right now, I'm going to consider just making some live CDs so I can at least experience it. Funny thing is, the old Pentium WILL boot from a CD, as long as it's not one of the newer ones, BUT I've already said I don't plan on using that one. This laptop has a nice processor and 2G RAM, and rarely even uses any swap unless it REALLY needs it! It does not require lightweight anything right now!

So, get the Pentium completely out of mind, it's staying as-is for now. The laptop is what I want to try different distros on.

So what you're saying is no Pentium right....??? (just kidding)

On a serious note, if you are just trying live CDs, then you don't even really need that external drive. Knoppix has the option of saving any changes you've made while running it live. Knoppix will also give you the option of installing it to the HDD, but it's not meant to run as a full installation. Ubuntu and Knoppix are both Debian based, so if it's something you may plan on doing a full install later on, you can probably skip Knoppix....

Yes, the Live Session is a real good way to try things out. You can use "persistence" with Ubuntu and Debian as well as Knopix. Run a search on it.

You do need a small partition (5Gb) on your drive to store the changes made so that you can have them when you reboot.

I am not sure why folks are worried about partitioning but they seem to be. I fool with my partition table all the time on 3 drives and have never had a problem.

Your use of an external would be pretty easy if your bios, like most modern bios (I think), allows you to turn off your internal drive(s). Mine does (specs in sig).

I use an external enclosure with two 320Gb WD drives in it for testing different OS'. I turn off both internals and just use it. That way there is no possibility of messing with my internal MBRs by accident (stupidity or a bug in some distro no one ever heard of) or my installs due to an unfamiliar installer or a fault in an installer.

You just need to set your bios to boot from the CD-rom first and the usb device second.

Virtualization is fine to an extent. The OS does not run, however, on real hardware. It runs on the hardware interface of the host OS. Therefore you are not seeing how the guest OS will actually function on your hardware. It is real good if you have a number of OS' you want to try and do not have the room to do so.

You have enough room for at least 10 OS', installed on 2 partitions (/ and /home) and with more than enough room to be used as hard as you want. I would go for 15Gb for your / partitions and 30 for your /home partitions. The 15Gb / is larger than most suggest and I will admit that 10 is enough for most folks. I collect and try programs. They go on /. Mine here (OS used 98% of the time) is only 30Gb and has 8.82Gb left open, this install is a year old, I probably should have gone with 35Gb. I think 15Gb is the right size for an OS you are just wanting to test (I like to test rigorously).

That size partitions would leave you with room for another OS on top of the possible 10 for a storage partition for any data from deleted OS' that you may want to keep.

You can also create separate / partitions and use a common /home partition. You need a different user name for each install doing it that way. While I prefer a / and /home for each install I have tried this method and there is nothing wrong with it at all. A lot of folks like to do it that way. 15Gb for each / and, on your drive you could use 300Gb for /home and have lots of room for a lot of installs.

To set up either of those setups you would need to format your drive. Use a 15Gb partition at the start of the drive, the rest of the drive should be one extended partition. Put your /swap at the end of the extended partition. Create the other partitions in the extended too. All partitions to be ext4 except your /swap.

In theory you can create about as many logical partitions in an extended partition as you want. I will admit that I have never had more than 23. After that I have have always screwed up by have an over lap or something and more partitions will not be created by either partition editor I use (cfdisk and gparted). This is more than enough to really test, on real hardware the few OS' that you want to test.

Create the partitions you want to use at about the size I suggest and you will have an awful lot of free space that you can use later.

Always use the manual partitioning option when installing.

Do not try to use any automatic install for multi booting. This leads to grief.

Have FUN.

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Run virtual machines on the usb if you have a fast enough system.

Here is a tutorial on booting multiple distros and how many can be used.

Booting 145

Thanks everyone! I'm an old hand at partitioning for Windows, DOS, VMS, and especially Linux, so that shouldn't be a problem. I wanted to at least get the live CD(s) and see what the default boot looks like. I already tried Ubuntu, and wasn't too impressed, but I'm going to do the same thing with Knoppix just to see how I like it. I'd thought of installing a couple of versions with all that disk space, I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to boot from the big external drive. Before I do anything like this, I do intend to back everything up first, just in case.

My Fedora install is on the 80G that was in the machine, and I split the big drive into equal parts ext4 and NTFS, as I needed to back up my old Windows files as well and figured they would do better on their native filesystem. Not sure if that's true, but didn't think it could hurt. I installed with a / partition of about 36-37G, and a /home of the same size. The rest I used for /boot and some swap space. I actually fill up the / partition faster than /home because I install so much stuff. The drive isn't truly 80G, but holds like 80,0XX,XXX,XXX bytes so they can call it 80G. I always thought that was so cheesy!

Anyway, I appreciate all the replies and thanks again!

I am really pleased to hear that I am not the only one that uses up / space in a hurry.

Seem to be doing it more under Debian than I did under Ubuntu. I suspect that it has to do with having more FUN with Debian.

That's kind of bizarre, as I had thought of trying plain Debian (if possible). What I DON'T want to do is waste a lot of CDs and bandwidth downloading all the different distros, or at least the most popular ones. Does anyone know how to use an ISO image to boot with, rather than having to burn it to disk everytime. I know they can be extracted, but can I extract to a regular HD and maybe edit GRUB to give an option to boot from the not-so-live-anymore CD image? What takes some getting used to are the different user interfaces, and I've tried KDE, I just don't like it as much as Gnome (MOST of the time). Since those are the most often heard about, most software was written on one or the other platform.

Anyway, I'll keep looking for more about maybe just running these from a disk rather than a CD. I just hope it can be done!

Thanks again, everybody.

Quite a few distributions offer to boot off of a live USB stick instead of a CD.

Almost any distribution can be run from USB. As I stated before, if you only want to get a feeling before doing an install, just boot the ISOs in a virtual machine.

You can boot Ubuntu and Ubuntu derived OS' ISOs directly from grub. As you install on 2 partitions the only thing that you have to remember is to put the ISO in a directory on your / partition.

I created an /etc/aa directory for this purpose as I wanted the buggers in /etc for ease of having them handy to check the exact file name of the ISO when writing the custom menu entry.
Note that the text between the "" is up to you. The first is what you will see when you run "update-grub" and the second what you will see on the menu screen when booting.

Copy paste the above entry to your /etc/grub.d/40_custom file. Edit to match your box. Save the file with a different name so that you still have a clean 40_custom file. A name like 06_custom will put the entry at the top of your menu. 11_custom will be after the entries for the OS providing grub to the MBR. 42_custom will put it at the end of the menu.

The numbers determine the the order that the scripts are read when generating your /boot/grub/grub.cfg file which is the source of the screen menu.

The "noprompt" entry in the instruction string of the ISO menu entry is so that you are not prompted to remove the CD when you reboot.

You can install from the Live session. I believe that you can also boot with the option of persistence if you have the appropriate partition (small 4-5Gb usually) on your drive for that purpose.

There are a number of other ISOs that will now boot with grub. A great source of info is;
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1549847

Have FUN.

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