Re: [sheflug] Mulit distros??? was Downloading and burningdistributions

[Peter Collier <pecb [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 23:45, J Simpson V21 wrote:
> Hi all,
> Got it sorted.  Thanks for your replies.
>
snip
> :-) ).  Would it be easy install it?  In my mind the easiest would be to
>
> have it as a standalone installation.  I could copy my home directory to
> my second hard drive and then copy that into Suse when it is up and
> running? Would that work or am I thinking about it wrong?  The
> difficulty I can see is organising the bootloader with the three choices
> of windows, fedora and suse?
>
> My other option probably the easiest if it goes well is to install the
> Suse over the Fedora and copy across my home directory from my second
> drive. So I would just have windows and suse.  If it goes badly I would
> be reinstalling fedora Core 2.
>
> Appreciate any comments from anyone who has tried multi distributions on
> a machine.
>
> Regards
>
> Janet

Janet,
	 I've had three distros running on one machine ok. Until recently I had 
win2000, ubuntu and suse 10.0. (There have been different combinations in the 
past, running with no problems). Suse 10.0 was the last distro I installed 
recently. The boot loader picked up win2000 and ubuntu. The only problem I 
had was when I upgraded the ubuntu kernel. The suse grub configuration would 
boot up ubuntu's old kernel. To get round that, I edited suse's menu.lst 
file, in /boot/grub changing the ubuntu kernel and initrd to the new values 
after the kernel upgrade and that sorted it. As regards copying your home 
directory from one distro to another. I found that if to start with, you only 
copied your personal documents that you've created with e.g. openoffice, your 
email files/addressbook and just the bookmarks from your browser, then you 
didn't have any problems. Choose carefully the settings you want to copy 
afterwards. Copying /home lock stock and barrel sometimes creates some 
sorting out problems, as some distros do things in a different way. 
	Another way is to copy /home entirely, try it and if it causes problems, 
delete the user, delete the users home directory,(don't delete /home itself, 
just the e.g. janet directory in /home) recreate the user and copy just the 
users documents etc over as per the first suggestion. 

Peter C

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