install different linux systems on ONE HARDDISC

['chris']

hi

I would like to install on only ONE HARDDISC following systems:

- SUSE
- Debian
- RedHat
- freeBSD

how should I create partitions on this harddisc ?

I think for every distribution:

1. Ext2 /boot partiton 100 MB ( primary )
2. Ext3 / partition 15 GB ( logical )

and on the end ONLY ONE SWAP 2 GB for all systems.

in MBR I'll install only GRUB from SUSE
and boot all systems.

LILO or GRUB from others systems will be installed in their /root partitions.

any idea ?

[Stuart Browne]

Umm, ugh?

FreeBSD isn't Linux, so won't be able to share a Swap partition.

And assuming you set the chanloader's correctly in the MBR's boot-loader (grub), you should be fine.

Just make sure none of the other Linuxen try to load it's neighbour's filesystems.

Incidentally, you won't be able to create that many primary partitions. But if you're doing this, you'll hopefully be using recent enough hardware so it won't matter.

[Steven E. Protter]

You may get two of these guys to live on one hard disk, but the chances that one grub(which one) will be compatabile with all of the other distributions is pretty low.

Like Stuart said, I think sharing the one swap is going to have systems booting up with no swap at all.

Too many eggs in one basket.

I think as an experiment its worth a try, because I'm interested in how and when the whole thing blows up.

I'd say you need a swap partition for each distribution because they probably handle it differently.

SEP

[Stuart Browne · Accepted solution]

Steven,

All the Linux distro's handle swap in the same way, and there'll be no issue sharing it.

Once it's got a swapfs on it ('mkswap'), it's the same. It doesn't matter what data is there upon boot-up, it gets cleaned.

Assuming you have only 1 filesystem for each distro, you should beable to get all of them to live side-by-side without too much effort. You are probably going to run out of file systems if you split them up too much.

Partition table something akin to this should be ok though:

/dev/hda1 100MB suse /boot
/dev/hda2 xxxxx swap for linux
/dev/hda3 xxxxx swap for freebsd
/dev/hda4 logical
/dev/hda5 15g suse /
/dev/hda6 15g debian /
/dev/hda7 15g redhat /
/dev/hda8 15g freebsd /

You should need to load the boot-loader into each file system, but just rely upon Grub on the MBR.

if you insist on a boot-loader for each successive, then ensure that the 'chainloader +1' is set for each grub section.

If all goes well, you should be alright, so long as the kernel files get put in the first few hundred mb of the filesystems. You just don't have the partition space to create a /boot for each, I don't think.

[Stuart Browne]

Oh I forgot.

You'll have to manually reconfigrue each distro's /etc/fstab to *FORCIBLY* mount given partitions, and not rely upon filesystem labels. Manually remove *ALL* file system labels, as this will screw you over.

[Vernon Brown_4]

I'm on my development box now using Windows at the moment. This box also boots into SuSE 9 whose home is a 40 GB drive hdb. Fedora Core 1 also lives on this box in a 4 GB partition on the hda drive. I use GRUB for the boot loader and within the GRUB menu the Floppy option boots Fedora.

All seem to live happily together. SuSE can see and copy files from Windows, but can't see Fedora. Fedora can't see Widows or SuSE.

So my guess is that you should be able to do what you are trying; don't know about the swap ??

Vern

[Steven E. Protter]

My philosophy is a server based approach. A box isn't a server or potential one unless its ready to work full time. Thats not how to learn things, which I guess you are trying.

It is how to set up production boxes and get things done. Therefore I never mess with multi partition systems. There is enough used hardware out there to keep me happy and in servers.

SEP