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

Ian Malone ibmalone at gmail.com
Fri Nov 25 11:27:12 UTC 2011


On 25 November 2011 08:33, Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko at greshko.com> wrote:
> On 11/25/2011 02:31 PM, Linux Tyro wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Ed Greshko<Ed.Greshko at greshko.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> What is the purpose for doing all of this?  Is it just to play with each
>>> distro?  That is, not really work?  If that is the case, then maybe
>>> you'd be better off using one distro and then having VM's for the others.

> Well, as a beginner, aren't you concerned that you'll be dividing up
> your time too much so that you'll not become proficient in one area and
> that you'll confuse the way things are done among the distros?

> I still like using VM's for my "alternate" distros as it is easy to take
> snap shots as you muck around and you can have multiple distros up and
> running at the same time so you can compare things.  Also, when and if
> you get tired of a particular distro you just delete the VM's.  Makes
> redistribution of empty space a whole lot easier.
>

I agree with this, it doesn't matter /too/ much which distribution
Linux Tyro actually goes with if you want to get general experience in
using Linux. Having lots of different distributions installed you'll
find that you:
1. End up doing lots of admin tasks on all of them. On this list we
tend to deal with lots of Fedora issues (e.g. not liking Gnome3, use
XFCE instead, problems with SELinux), but other distros will have
their own problems. With five distros you could potentially end up
doing five times as much of this annoying problem solving stuff. That
might be exactly the experience you're looking for or it might get in
the way of doing more interesting stuff. However...
2. You'll probably end up using one over the others. I had to break
into the windows install on my laptop last month because it turned out
I hadn't actually booted it into windows for two years and had
forgotten the password.

Picking one and going with VMs for the others as Ed Greshko suggests
is probably a good compromise, unless you really want to investigate a
good way of getting so many systems to boot together happily.

-- 
imalone


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