penta-booting hard-disk: who would administer the hard-disk office?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 11/24/2011 06:07 PM, Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-11-24 at 11:48 -0500, Linux Tyro wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> As I have liked Linux (yes, I am windows convert), so with 2 GB RAM
>> and 250 GB hard-disk, I am now going to make hard-disk penta boot as
>> follows:-
>>
>> Fedora - 20 GB - installing it,  - /root  (20 GB)
>> openSUSE - 10 GB installing with /root (10 GB)
>> Ubuntu - 10 GB installing with /root (10 GB)
>> Debian - 10 GB installing with /root (10 GB)
>> Mint - 10 GB installing with /root (10 GB)
>>
>> /home - 190 GB (remaining space)
>
> Another option would be to have /boot partitions for each OS (small --
> 500 MB max) and do everything else in LVM. This gives you the
> flexibility to increase or decrease the size of the various filesystems
> easily without repartitioning.

In a similar setup, I use cascaded/chain-loaded grubs.

I.e. I have a "master grub" /boot partition, which chainloads indivdual 
"boot" partitions of other OSes.

I.e. my partitioning basically looks like this:
/dev/sda1	boot (master grub partition, contains only grub).

/dev/sda<N>	OS<N>'s /boot
/dev/sda<N+1>   OS<N>'s swap
/dev/sda<N+2>   OS<N>'s /

/dev/sda<M>	OS<M>'s /boot
/dev/sda<M+1>   OS<M>'s swap
/dev/sda<M+2>   OS<M>'s /
...

Due to the "smartness" of some OSes/Linux distros' installers, setting 
up this is quite tricky. The advantage of this setup is that it keeps 
all OS's bootloaders independent and avoids interferences between them.

I had used LVN for a long time in this kind of setup, but it has shown 
to be more of a nuissance than being helpful and meanwhile removed it.

Shareing /home only works to some extend, because all OSes/Linux distros 
carry some amount of incompatibility inside of their "per-user 
configurations", which may cause problems when switching betwen OSes.

Ralf