Multi-booting across various linux flavors

[lazyboy]

Dear LNO people,
I have two hard disks and both are on the primary IDE controller. The first disk is dedicated to win98 the other is halfly dedicated to red hat 7.1. I plan to buy copies of mandrake, debian, and openbsd and install them in my second drive. Is it possible? I have 17.2 GB hard disk with 6GB left in the second drive which I gave space to Red Hat 7.1. Please tell me is there a howto that describes how to do it? Thank you very much.

[lilrabbit129]

well i know for sure you cna make all your linux distro's share teh same swap partition. i'm not really sure about bsd...

[Craig McPherson]

All Linuxes can share swap, and all Linuxes can share a /home partition if you have one. You can probably (don't quote me on this) get OpenBSD to share that /home partition as well. I know *BSD has ext2 filesystem support, but I'm not sure how good/native it is.

The bootloader issues can get a bit complex. I'll post another message about that here in a minute.

[lazyboy]

What bootloader should I use? LILO, GRUB, ranish partition manager? After installation of a flavor of linux, its bootable image should be placed in the /boot partition? or into the MBR?

[ryan00002]

boot magic is a good 3rd party, otherwise lilo is ok... some ppl have problems with it, i've never had a problem with lilo though.