[SLUG] If it isn't broke, then don't fix it ? / or is the grass greener ?

[Stephen O'Neill]

woz wrote:
> This is my problem, alot of people I have been talking to keep raving 
> about Debian - their spin seems to be that Debian is less tied in to 
> 'corporate' based linux distros so I was thinking about giving it ago - 
> but I dont want to damage my Fedora 8 installation as I just have it 
> running on one disk as a stand alone linux machine. My partition 
> knowledge is fine if I want to run a dual boot XP/Linux or Linux only 
> (which I do - it's been nearly a year without any Microsoft software on 
> my machine !) The idea of running several different distros on one hard 
> drive just confuses me - how would you get them GRUB to boot them ?


Hi Woz,

The process for dual booting multiple Linux distros is the same as dual 
booting any other operating systems. (the term 'dual' boot is a little 
misleading as it indicates only two, 'multi'-boot would be more accurate).

Your first job is to re-partition your drive so that Debian can be 
installed into the new partition(s) without interfering with Fedora.

The Debian installer may or may not be helpful and re-use your existing 
grub installation, I would make a backup of /boot/grub/menu.lst just in 
case. The key thing is that the 'root' will differ for your Fedora and 
Debian installs.

I'm not sure whether /boot will also need to be on its own partition (if 
it isn't already - my Ubuntu does not have a separate partition).

At some point you may want to put /home on a different partition so that 
you can mount it with Ubuntu and Debian but I would exercise caution 
that if you say use Gnome as your desktop that the version installed on 
both is identical and stuff...

You may want to create your drive setup in a virtual machine first and 
give the debian install a dry run through on that to make sure you're happy.

This post here is triple-booting windows/ubuntu/fedora, the principles 
will be the same as for you and 'triple boot' may be good search engine 
fodder:

http://www.go2linux.org/triple-boot-windows-two-linux

Obviously do backup your data before getting cracking and good luck!

-- 
Stephen O'Neill
w: http://www.thefloatingfrog.co.uk/
e: squid at thefloatingfrog.co.uk

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