[KLUG Members] Multibooting distros

[Todd Pillars]

On Fri, 2004-01-16 at 09:55, Mark Kowitz wrote:
> I hope this isn't too much of a Novice issue to mention here, but:
> If I set up a few different distros on my system (say RedHat, Suse,
> whatever)
I currently have Win98SE, SuSE 9, and Fedora on a 20G HD. I installed
them in that order, re-partitioning during the SuSE into 3 (roughly 6G)
partitions.

> , could each of these share the same swap partition?
I only specified 1 swap partition during the SuSE install (of 512Mb) and
the fedora install picked it up.

>   Could they
> share application installs, or do I need duplicate installations of Open
> Office, etc. on each system?
I have duplicated of each (because they are different versions by
default)

But by modifying fstab you could mount other partitions (as long as the
kernel supports the file system) and use applications stored there.

fdisk is good for finding out how your system lays out the partitions.
while in fdisk only use the p and q keys to display and quit
respectively - don't think of touching the w key while in there :)

Be very careful of the placement of the /boot partition for each
individual distros, subsequent linux installs have to be in the /
filesystem path as opposed to their own partition - I lost my fedora for
a time, and I cannot say it wasn't my error, but it came back after I
found a broken link.

Also note that grub is very good at booting multiple OS, but the default
syntax for each distro is different. I used a copy of menu.lst
(grub.conf) from a seperate box as an example to go by.

Linux Magazine has had an article on grub for the last two months, but,
unfortunately, they are not on the web yet. Head to your favorite news
stand if you can.

Todd