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

[Peter Humphrey <prh [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 23:45, J Simpson V21 wrote:

> :-) ).  Would it be easy install it?

No more difficult than with only two OSs, provided that everything works ok.

> 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? 

It sounds logical, but I would caution against having one home partition 
common to two distros. I know that isn't what you said, but just in 
case  :-)

My reason is that there are too many subtle differences in the ways that 
distros (and desktops and their versions) use their home directories, and I 
found some years ago that it was much safer to have separate home 
partitions. Of course one does have documents and other things that should 
be available everywhere; my solution is to have another ~/common partition, 
which I mount on whichever system I've started. The common stuff goes in 
there, and all the dotted directories stay safely uncontaminated with the 
detritus of other systems. Here's an extract from the /etc/fstab on this 
KDE system:

# <fs>          <mountpoint>            <type>  <opts>              
<dump/pass>
/dev/hdb2       /boot                   ext2    noatime                 1 1
/dev/hdb5       /                       ext3    noatime                 1 1
/dev/hdb6       /home                   ext3    noatime                 1 1
/dev/hdb11      /usr/local              ext3    noatime                 1 2
/dev/hdb12      /tmp                    ext3    noatime                 1 2
/dev/hdb13      /var-bits               ext3    noatime                 1 2
/dev/hdb14      /usr-bits               ext3    noatime                 1 2
/dev/hdb15      /home/prh/common        ext3    noatime                 1 2
/dev/hdb7       /mnt/xfce               ext3    noatime,noauto,user     0 2
/dev/hdb8       /mnt/xfce/home          ext3    noatime,noauto,user     0 2
/dev/hdb9       /mnt/gnome              ext3    noatime,noauto,user     0 2
/dev/hdb10      /mnt/gnome/home         ext3    noatime,noauto,user     0 2
/dev/dvd        /mnt/dvd                iso9660 noauto,ro,user          0 0
/dev/cdrw       /mnt/cdrw               iso9660 noauto,user             0 0
/dev/fd0        /mnt/floppy             vfat    noauto,user             0 0
/dev/sda1       /mnt/sda1               vfat    noatime,noexec,noauto,user  
0 0

> The  difficulty I can see is organising the bootloader with the three
> choices of windows, fedora and suse?

Shouldn't really be a problem.

> 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.

But if you install SuSE alongside Fedora you won't have to do that :-)

-- 
Rgds
Peter.

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