Multiple Distros on one drive?

Escape · 10 Nov 2007 at 16:26

I'm partitioning off a portion of my hard disk for dual-booting Linux with Windows.

There's enough space to install two distros, so is it better to keep the them apart, or can I safely share partitions between them, like the swapfile, /home, /usr... etc?

The first ones on will be Fedora and Ubuntu, one of which will stay. Then I'll continue to try out other the flavours of Linux.

If I am to keep them apart, how well does it work to install two distros on the same drive, with identical partition names?

|Thomas| · 10 Nov 2007 at 18:30

What would be easier is rather than sharing a /home partition, share the partition under a completely different mount point. I've created a /files partition for example where I dump everything rather than /home, it makes backing stuff up easier too.

whitecrook · 10 Nov 2007 at 19:32

The partition names won't be identical, they will be named something like /dev/hda1-11 say, and 1-3,5-6 will be first distro, and second distro will have 7-11, (4 will be the extended partition, I think) And each OS mounts it's own partitions whereever it wants, be that home / usr / etc whatever.

Personally, unless you are doing Wild testing and stuff in one or both, I would share the home directory partition, and the Idea of a files partition is a good idea as it keeps it separate from both OS's.

This way all your settings / preferences, and stuff follow you between machines. This is the idea of the home directory.

gumbald · 10 Nov 2007 at 23:23

Yeah, depends what you'll be doing. Sharing a home directory could be useful as you won't have to setup Firefox and Thunderbird in each OS, they'll both use the same.

If you've got a 40gb drive, give 10gb ext3 for the first OS, 10gb ext3 for the second, 19gb as ext3 for /home and 1gb of swap.

eXor · 12 Nov 2007 at 20:23

whitecrook said:
This way all your settings / preferences, and stuff follow you between machines. This is the idea of the home directory.

There is no chance of one distro overwriting or otherwise interfering with another distro's files?

gumbald · 12 Nov 2007 at 20:35

As long as you don't format the /home when you install another distro, but just mount the same location.

Cake · 21 Nov 2007 at 11:07

/home is where all the setting for each of your applications are stored, so it's a good idea to share the /home between OSs so that you don't need to re-configure your apps for each OS.