Quad-boot Win7, Fedora 12, OpenSUSE11.2 and Ubuntu 9.10

[taytong888]

Hi,

I am looking for guidance on quad-booting Win7, Fedora 12, OpenSUSe11.2 and Karmic Ubuntu 9.10. My laptop has a 250 GB SATA hard disk. In terms of the Linuxes, may I have just one Home partition and one swap partition to be shared among the OS's?

By the way, I know how to use GParted to dual boot Windows and Linuxes. Just need more help in multibooting as requested above. Thanks in advance.

[aigle]

This might help a bit.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=257528

[taytong888]

Thank you aigle. Just to clarify my original post further. Right now my laptop has Win7 where System Reserved and Drive C already take up 2 primary partitions. This leave only 2 primary partitions left for the 3 Linux OS's, some of which may or may not need their own Boot partitions. Do they have to be in primary partitions, or can they reside in extended/logical partitions. Basically, I wish to know how I can install all 3 Linux OS's in the same hard disk as Win 7 such that they share the same Home partition and Swap partition.

[Mrkvonic]

You can place all Linux distros/partitions in the Extended partition, i.e. logical.
Mrk

[aigle]

Yes I think you can as in my case triple boot worked even though I used logical partotions for ubuntu and PCLOS.

[Ocky]

-{ Quote: "Note: It makes no difference to Ubuntu whether it is installed in primary or logical partitions.
If there are already three primary partitions will be forced to make an extended partition and install Ubuntu in logical partitions." }-

No problem

[lewmur]

-{ Quote: "Thank you aigle. Just to clarify my original post further. Right now my laptop has Win7 where System Reserved and Drive C already take up 2 primary partitions. This leave only 2 primary partitions left for the 3 Linux OS's, some of which may or may not need their own Boot partitions. Do they have to be in primary partitions, or can they reside in extended/logical partitions. Basically, I wish to know how I can install all 3 Linux OS's in the same hard disk as Win 7 such that they share the same Home partition and Swap partition." }-
The Linux OSs don't have to boot from primary partitions. I usually prefer that because resizing extended partitions can cause problems. And no Linux distro requires a separate boot partition. And, yes, you can use one /home partition and one swap partition for all three Linux distro, IF you know how.

Using ONE separate boot partition for all OSs can be helpful in that grub has to install someplace and if you are constantly changing distros the way some of us do, then if you remove the distro where grub is expecting to find its files, you may have to reinstall grub manually.

I recommend partitioning the entire drive when installing the first Linux distro. When doing so, leave the "reserved" partition alone and resize the Win7 partition
to what you want to reserve for it. Then create a small primary /boot partition, 1gb will do, and an extended partition for the rest of the drive. Then create a logical partitions of about 10gb each for the three Linux distros and one logical swap partition. Partition the remaining space as a logical /home partition. (Or you might want to leave some unallocated space for future distros.)

[wilbertnl]

taytong888, if you plan to use one partition as a shared /home partition for all your distro's, you might encounter some disadvantages.
I have experienced that different distro's have different user ID's. Ubuntu may have 1000 while openSUSE may have 500 as first user ID.
Also, you want to keep all the settings separate, in order to get the different distro experiences. Ubuntu's KDE settings may differ from OpenSUSE KDE settings.

My solution is to rename my home folder to names like /home/wilbert-ubuntu9.10, /home/wilbert-openSUSE11.2, etc.
And to modify the password file with the editor 'vipw'.

It seems a convenient solution, but a single /home partition for multiple distro's has it's challenges.