How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

[ScottyK]

If there is a better place for this question, feel free to move it!

How many distro's can somebody load on a hard drive?

Currently I have a 300GB drive on my notebook, divided into three partitions.

1st partition is Win7
2nd partition is whatever flavor of Linux I'm running at the moment
3rd partition is a shared multimedia drive.

I've really become apt at zapping the linux partition, installing something else and not wipe out the windows partition.

Now I'd like to load some other distros, and at boot time pick whatever I feel like running.

But one problem I already see is things like email. Where would I store the thunderbird settings so all the distros could access it, or is that getting too crazy??

is there a way to share commonly used items (docs, music, email, videos) amongst ALL the distros?

[rfakhrai]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

Well nothing is too crazy! This is a very interesting question. My simple answer would be to have all of your files on one distro (kubuntu 10.10 for example) and you should be able to mount that partition in other distros and access the files therein.

Windows is, as always, more complicated. A program like Ext2Read will facilitate that but you have to copy the file you want into Windows to be able to use it. No real-time access.

And, AFAIK, you can have as many OSs on your harddrive as you feel competent to manage.

Are these the answers you're looking for?

[dibl]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

How many distro's can somebody load on a hard drive?

Currently I have a 300GB drive on my notebook, divided into three partitions.

300 / 5GB per Linux = 60 Linuces, if you nuke the Windows installation, of course.


No data, no swap, no room for growth or downloads or anything else. Just 60 Linux operating systems. Good luck with it.

[ScottyK]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

OK, that addresses the theoretical aspects of it. 60 different Linux, wow!

Now to bring it down to a more manageable 5-6 OS.

For now I'm keeping the Windows partition, because I've yet to get Civilization 4 to run correctly under linux. Closest I've arrived to a 100% operational game is under 10.10, and that has no sound. Civ4 is now the only reason for keeping Windows around.

Keeping all important personal files under one main OS (Kubuntu) makes sense.

But can other programs "write" to the shared directories without too much headache?

Can I have 5-6 Thunderbird programs from 5-6 different distros all accessing the same data? (not at the same time of course).

Saw the price of 500GB laptop drives, that this is what got me thinking!

[dibl]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

I recall having 3 OS's on the boot menu, once. I found that keeping them updated and configured was more work than justified by the "variety". Today, I have one OS on the boot menu, and 2 more available via Virtualbox VMs. Much saner, this way.

If your Windows game is dependent on having direct access to the graphics chip, then you probably need to stay dual-booted. Beyond that, to experiment with multiple Linux distributions, I would advise installing virtualbox or VMware, and put your next guinea pig on a VM. That way your main OS is not in harm's way, if damage and destruction should occur on the VM.

[rfakhrai]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

Yes, as dibl has mentioned, why do you want to have so many different distros on separate partitions? VB is a perfectly reasonable way to test out other distros.

But to answer your question, the programs can write to the shared directories without any headache as long as fstab understands that they are read-write partitions.

NOW the headache is running 5-6 different thunderbirds with access to the same data. But you're the one that wants to play with fire. Go forth, experiment.

[Qqmike]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

Wanna shoot for 97? Like saikee:
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=143973
(plus some others to boot ...)

[rfakhrai]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

I learned something I didn't know from post #21 in that thread, Qqmike. PATA disks are incapable of having more than 15 partitions since kernel 2.6.20.

There's your answer, OP!

[Qqmike]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

Yeah, and depends on the MBR data structure, too. I'm forgetting some of this stuff (included in my GRUB 2 Guide), but something like 128 partitions are possible under certain OSs? This sort of thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

[ScottyK]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

Looks like dibl's advice is the path I'm going to go.

The original intent was to find the one distro that the Windows game worked under, but it's just as easy to keep 40Gb around for a Win partition and dual boot. Then I can test to my hearts delight in the VM world.

rfakhrai - is your avatar of Kirk Cameron?

[rfakhrai]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

freddy prinze jr.

[oshunluvr]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

Assuming no separate partitions for anything other than linux, 63 per IDE drive or 15 per SCSI (PATA, SATA) drive - one install per partition.

However, logical partition limits are kernel limits, not hard drive ones. This is because the kernel is using libdata to access the partition structure.

You can also create more partitions than the above limits using LVM multiple logical volumes inside a
single "physical" partition.

Using VM's your only limit is GB's!

[ScottyK]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

If your Windows game is dependent on having direct access to the graphics chip, then you probably need to stay dual-booted.

I really wish I knew what I did, but Civilization 4 is now running perfectly within Kubuntu!

[doctordruidphd]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

is there a way to share commonly used items (docs, music, email, videos) amongst ALL the distros?

Yes. I have 5 different linux installations, each with it's own /home directory. That is because aptosid, lucid LTS, maverick, and natty often each have their own versions of various programs, and they REALLY don't like reading config files from the wrong version. But within each ~, there are symbolic links to pictures, documents, music, etc -- all of the stuff that really doesn't have much to do with program versions, and is sharable data. I also have symbolic links for /usr/share/wallpapers, which saves quite a bit of space given all the downloaded images I keep around.

One problem I found is that neither thunderbird nor firefox like symbolic links to their respective dotfiles -- a link from ~/.mozilla just doesn't get followed, and I don't know why. Ditto thunderbird. Since I seriously dislike both iceweasel and firefox-4-beta, I have the downloaded version from mozilla installed in all of my systems, and can therefore rsync the dotfiles between them with no problems.

[oshunluvr]

Re: How many Linux Distros can I install on one hard drive?

My method to to share files is to have a dedicated /home partition for my main install (the one I use regularly) and then leave /home within the install for the others. Then I mount (if needed) the main /home partition as /files and link to Documents, Downloads, whatever as desired.