? about installing multiple Linux OS's on same drive.

[jrich4]

I am currently running RedHat 9.0 on my current system. What I want to do is on a totally separate system install Fedora, Slackware, and maybe FreeBSD. I am planning on using grub as the bootloader and about 10gb per OS. I have never had multiple *nix OS's on the same system before only Linux and windows. If anyone has ever installed multiple *nixes on the same system and has any tips I would be greatly appreciative. In paticular I need to know how the different partitions are setup so that everything will work properly for each OS.
Thanks,
jrich4

[ZiaTioN]

I have done it with 2 seperate revisions of Solaris but never with Linux, or more specifically never with the distros you mentioned. It should all be similar though.

the following links should be very helpfull to you.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/l ... dboot.html

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linu ... lboot.html

I have only found RedHat howto's but the process should be the same. Oddly enough you asked this question in a RedHat forum so the response is fitting

[Calum]

my advice is set up your partitions first and preferably install the OS with GRUB which you want to use last (probably fedora), simply because it will be less work to let the red hat installer configure grub for you. if you install another os after it, just don't overwrite the master boot record, or if you do, obviously you can justuse your boot floppy and do a "grub-install" to sort it out. what else... don't let the linuces share a /home partition unless you have the same versions of all your software (kde, gnome, mozilla etc) or they'll mess around with each others dot files in your home dir. theywill anyway in fact. you could try using different user id numbers on each system but i think it's simpler not to have a shared /home dir, just to mount each others partitions in each OS. your FreeBSD will want all its partitions within its own partition. it makes "slices" within its partition and won't share swap or any other partitions with a linux. If you want to mount it from linux, you will need to compile support for the unix file system into your linux kernel. i think freeBSD supports linux ext2 filesystems by default though (not so sure though).

thats the extent of my meager knowledge. my advice is try it, and keep reinstalling and have fun. and try out lycoris, basiclinux, evil entity etc while you have the disk space for it.

[Ice9]

Calum, I remember you had a nice little picture about the layout of the different partitions, back in the days when we were haunting the place that can't be named.
Do you still have it, if so I would be very grateful if you could upload it one more time for me to save it.

Also, wouldn't it be better if he had all the different OS'es use the same swap partition, maybe not better but no waste of space?

[Calum]

sorry sorry sorry! i forgot to say that! your linuces can share the same swap partition, but your freeBSD won't be able to, and your windows (which i notice isn't one of the planned OSs) has a swap file instead, within its own partition, which you should always limit to about 1 1/2 times the size of your RAM in my opinion.

sorry, ice but i don't have that diagram anymore though i could whip one up if you like, but that one was about installing windows and linuces, not freebsd and linuces. with multiple linuces, the sharing or not sharing of the /home directories is a key issue, and also remembering to share the swap partitions too, as you say, though most linux installers nowadays will prompt you to do this anyway.