On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 02:40:44PM -0400, Matthew Patenaude wrote:
> I like deb systems as well. I have used others: Suse, Fedora, but ever since I
> started using Ubuntu and other deb based derivs, I have been reluctant to go
> back.
>
> Question: If you install another Linux on your hard drive, how do you make
> enough partitions? /home obviously can be used by whatever distro is on there,
> so you don't need more that one /home, but are you still limited by the <4
> primary partitions? Do you have to set up logical partitions to manage the
> different Linuxes you have installed? I prefer to have several primary
> partitions, but have never needed more than /, /home, and /swap. That's three
> already, so suppose you like to set up / , /usr, /home, /swap, and you want
> another Linux with its own /, and /usr, making a total of six partitions?
If you like DEB-based systems, and are a GNOME person, you may really
like Foresight Linux. http://www.foresightlinux.com/ Foresight uses
package management that actually has more features than DEB-based
package managers. (This is in sharp contrast to RPM-based package
management which is barely better than Windows package management, and
much more crude than DEB-based package management.)
If I were going to be playing with multiple Linux partitions I'd go for
a layout more like:
/boot (shared by all distros)
/home (shared by all distros)
swap (shared by all distros)
extended
Distribution A (/ or /media/distA)
Distribution B (/ or /media/distB)
...
If you're trying out multiple distributions I do not recommend
partitions finer grained than this. While there is a Linux file system
standard, an unfortunate number of distributions ignore part or all of
it. (Here's an example of how thoroughly people ignore the filesystem
standard. The /usr/local tree should mirror /usr. It should never have
application trees, so /usr/local/apache and /usr/local/mysql violate the
Linux file system standard. To conform to the standard they should be
located off of /opt or split up.)
You need to get off of the x86 BIOS before you can have more than 4
primary partitions. The bootable partition must be one of the primary
partitions, however in the case of Linux all you need is /boot as a
primary partition. (Even that isn't always an issue with the right
boot manager, as long as the boot manager's partition is a primary
partition.)
There are Intel-based systems which use EFI instead of the BIOS, and
they have a different partitioning scheme. (The most common consumer
systems using EFI right now would probably be Intel Macs.)
Personally, I'm a big fan of Logical Volume Management (LVM). It allows
you to dynamically resize partitions (including shrinking one partition
to create a new one). It does need the partition to be *unmounted* to
do the work, which means either a bootable CD, a single-user mode that
allows the partitions you want to change to be unmounted, or simply a
small Linux installation on an alternate partition. However, I doubt
LVM will really cooperate with multiple distributions. (There's an
expectation that you can backup the LVM configuration in /etc, and you
can't do that if you have /etc available on multiple partitions.)
One important note, if using a multiple physical partitioning scheme (as
opposed to logical volume management) you have hard operating system
limits for the numbers of partitions available. More than that, these
limits have traditionally been larger for ATA (hd[a-f]) drives than they
have been for SCSI (sd[a-h]) drives. However, newer Linux kernels have
SATA devices using the SCSI infrastructure, causing SATA devices to no
longer use the traditional 'hd' prefix, and changing the limits on the
number of partitions.
There are no limits to the number of partitions available for Logical
Volume Management. If you're going to use a fine-grained partitioning
scheme, you will want to go with LVM.
Personally, you may be in for trouble even sharing a /home between
distributions. The problem is that differing distributions can use
radically different versions of a program, and that program can
"upgrade" your configuration file for you, this would be fine if you
were sticking with one version, but when you go back to the other
distribution things may not work correctly.
Also, since you'll be sharing /home, make sure that they all agree on
your user-id. Some distributions start user-ids at 500, while others
start with user-id 1000. Even then, some distributions have the initial
user-id be 1000, while others have the initial user-id be 1001.
Personally, when I've been exploring alternate distributions, I tend to
just reuse a single partitioning scheme. I keep the /home distribution,
and wipe everything else. My important configuration files don't change
and anything that does complain (such as that god-awful gconf crap) just
gets wiped if there are any problems.
Many, if not most distributions, can also be tested using virtual
machines. VMs are a perfect way to test distributions. You can test
an arbitary number, compare them side-by-side, and decide on which to
explore on real hardware.
Cheers,
Steven Black
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