Installing and tri or even quad boot?

[martyMar]

Hello..
I have few problems with linux other than my inability to remember things more than a few minutes because of the fact I'm not getting any younger so I'll skip my mental history and get to the point. I will be working for a large site doing software reviews for free software for linux systems or distributions of various kinds..In other words a software reviewer and html author... and here's the crux: I don't know how to do partitioning and the more I read up on it the more confused i get, but I need at minimum at least 2, preferably 4 versions of linux running on this box. I naturally don't need to run them all at once, but need to be able to boot them all at diff times..
I am totally and completely lost on partitioning the hard drives on this beast and have utterly no clue what to do next.

Currently i have RH 9 installed.. This box has 2 hard drives. One is about 9gigs, the other about 5..maybe 3.5, i forget..oops, it says 186mbs but i know it to be much larger than that..
Anyway.. I have redhat using up almost all of hdb and just a tiny sliver of a..
Where can I find some info on this I can understand a little easier so i can go forward? I'm sort of stuck at just RH and the ISO's I have ready to go..
I keep reading and getting more and more confused..


Thanks ahead of time for any help..
martyMar

[blizz]

I believe it is only possible to have only one Linux partition (plus one for MS Windows if you dual-boot). However it may be better to have more linux partitions so that you can keep o/s systems separate.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

You are looking at someone who has successfully quintuple-booted a machine:
Windows 98
Slackware 8.1
Mandrake 9
FreeBSD 4.6.2
Red Hat 8


You can have many Linux partitions. You can configure your bootloader to boot any of them. Personally, I prefer to use a bootloader like XOSL. It's home site, www.xosl.org, seems down right now, but using that to multiboot is WAY easier than even configuring grub or lilo.

[Sepero]

Is there a real need to review so many different versions of GNU/Linux? After you get everything setup, the only real difference is your packagemanager...

I wonder why LVM isn't more popular?

[martyMar]

There probably isn't a real HUGE need to have so many, but there are so many variations that the more information I have the better the reviews I can do.

Thanks for the bit about XOSL.. The site is still down so I'll googleize it and see what happens..

[Alvis]

XOSL now found here:

http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm

[StarTiger]

In the past i had a five way boot system between win98se, winxp pro, rh6.2, rh 8.2, and 'drake 9.2 (needless to say, i don't use wither of the two RH's anymore and have sence removed them).

The trick is in how you install everything.

First off, give everything a sepweate partition. swap paritions you can share, and i had a common /boot partition ar the beginning of hdb ( you may or may not need to do that now.) but the windows each need their own partition and each distro need'd it's own /.

It's easiest if you use a 3rd party partitioning software. (i'm partial to partition magic, but that's me.) GO though and set up all your partions.

Start installing the different os's. in this order: windows, distros that won't be handling the boot manager, and then the distro the will manage the boot manager last.

For all, except the last distro, select to setup the bootloader form thi's partition, not the mbr.

If your're using a common /boot partition, give it at least 150 MB per distro when you set it up. then when installing , format it the first go round, but make sure that you don't format it on amy subsiquent installs. otherwise you'll have to start all over.

On the last distro install, at the end, select to have it put the bootloader in the /mbr, and make sure that all of the o.s.'s have entries in the boot menu. Finish up and reboot

good luck.