Multiple Linux machine with Solaris 1

[perrymans]

I am getting a second laptop hard drive, 40GB, to allow me to play with Linux distros and Sun Solaris. There are many sites out there telling hoe they put respective distros onto a Dell Inspiron 4100, but most are single installs or shared with Windows.

I want to split my 40GB hard drive to accomodate multiple Linux distros, and I would rather set that up before hand. I will not be putting Windows on here, but I would like a FAT32 partition so that I could transfer files if need be.

Would I need a seperate swap partition for each distro?
What partition format should I use (Ext2, Ext3, FAT32)?
What other things would need to be addressed for placing multiple flavors on a single drive?
I worry about the boot loader.
Can Solaris be added to a boot loader as well?

Anything you can think of is appreciated.

Thanks. Sean.

 

[flugh]

Would I need a seperate swap partition for each distro?
Not for the Linux distros. Just make a single swap partition, and each one will be able to use it. Not sure if Solaris can use it or not.

What partition format should I use (Ext2, Ext3, FAT32)?
I'm using ext3 and have had great success. The power goes out fairly frequently, and I'm still too dense to buy a UPS backup. But I haven't lost any data ever, including with apache and mysql.

What other things would need to be addressed for placing multiple flavors on a single drive?
I'd go with a single / partition for each Linux distro, let them all share a single swap partition. Not what I use for 'real' systems, but will make reinstalling (after inevitably breaking) a distro easier.

I worry about the boot loader. Can Solaris be added to a boot loader as well?
I found a couple posts showing how to add it to the grub bootloader:

[URL unfurl="true"]http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2002-07/msg00112.html[/URL]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/grub.html[/URL]

--
JR

 

[perrymans]

Thanks JR! So you tink I should have one /swap and one / (root) that they all share?

What size should I make each of these?

Do I have to point them each to it during the installs? Isn't there specific info written to root by one distro which could foul up another?

Thanks. Sean.

 

[pupu]

Be sure you don't have LBA switched on while installing Solaris. It seems to pretty much ignore it (tried ver 8). Solaris cannot use Linux' swap. I was using a combination of w98/w2k/linux/solaris and ended up with solaris on separate drive. And you will probably want to replace Sun's X-es with XFree - I really recommend it.

 

[Morsing]

Sean, you misunderstood JR's post. Don't put / (root) on the same partition, you need seperate ones for that.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[flugh]

Yes, 1 swap partition, and a single ext3 partition for each distro you want to run. Some installers, like Mandrake, will happily make 3 partitions if you let it auto-allocate your disk space. That's just aggravating the next time you want to try another distro and are trying to remember what you put where. I've made it a practice keep /home on a seperate partition so that it will easily live through a reinstall (you just don't format it during installation).

Hope that helps. Good luck. I'm off to work! --
JR

 

[perrymans]

So something like this?:

hda1 /boot 100MB
hda2 /Sun Boot 100MB
hda3 /swap 1GB
hda4 / Red Hat 4GB
hda5 / Debian 4GB
hda6 / Slackware 4GB
hda7 FAT32 1GB (located at the end of the free space)

Does that look about right?

Also, in cfdisk, I don't see an option for ext3 file system. I saw Linux and Linux Extended, but nothing that actually said ext3. Is ext3 the Linux extended and ext2 is what they ean by Linux file system types?

Thanks. Sean.

 

[flugh]

Well, the problem with a single /boot is each distribution will want to put it's own kernel image and other files in it. They tend to make a symlink kernel->default-kernel-image. So you run lilo in the second distro, then try to boot the first distro. The file info changes... I don't know for sure. It would probably boot only the last kernel you ran lilo on... it could work. You'd need to do something like:

Symlink: /boot/vmlinuz-debian -> <debian's default kernel image>, then /boot/vmlinuz-redhat -> <redhat's default>
But this would be a real pain come kernel update/upgrade/change time using the distro's package manager. It's going to make it's own symlinks and all. You'd also have to keep an identical lilo.conf file in each distro.

Doable, but a headache. Maybe making bootdisk for each distro (leaving out the shared /boot partition) would work out better. Maybe just try one distribution at a time. Install it, run it into the ground, install and configure junk until it refuses to boot, then try another distro (or fix the first one, then move on to the second one, whatever). Good learning process

--
JR