[LBo] How to make a bunch of flavours of unix

[Stefan Waidele]

Hi Ali,

Ali Metin schrieb:
> I have an 300GB hd. Plenty of room as you may say. I want to have
> experience    with lots of (say 5) distros.

Give them 20GB each (one big root-partition for each distro).
Create one swap-partition. You can reuse it in each distro.

You will probably need a seperate /boot partition.

Don't fragment the installs into several partitions (/usr, /home/etc, 
...) That would make a complete mess.

Make one big partition for data-exchange which you can mount in each 
distribution.

I'd suggest something like: (assuming hda is your drive)
/hda1 -> swap
/hda2 -> boot
/hda5 -> Distro 1
/hda6 -> Distro 2
/hda7 -> Distro 3
/hda8 -> Distro 4
/hda9 -> Distro 5
/hda10 -> Data Exchange

I would also pick distros that differ fundamentally:

Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Slackware
You will get many different experiences with these.

I wanted tosuggest OpenSuse for demo purposes only. IMO, Suse should not 
be endorsed until Novell has sorted out the mess it caused for Linux by 
sleeping with Microsoft.
But the latest news about Novel has convinced me not to recommend Suse 
at all anymore:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061204130954610
and
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20061203100147722

> For this purpose what do
> you think about    if it will be    a good way to install them on the
> same hard disk same machine?    Or if you have another idea, could
> please phrase it? I dont know much    how I install only one grub and
> manage all those installs. 

Well, you will be an expert in GRUB once you finished ;)

Seriously: You either pick up something about bootloader along the way, 
or you can use VMware to create a virtual PC for each distro you evaluate.
But knowing about bootloaders is very usefull. Trust me ;)

Stefan