Dual Linux system how to?

[Rastar]

Okay since both RH and Mandy are/have come out with new releases I thought I would ask this question.

I have a 40 gig HD and would love to have a dual Linux system with RH on primary partition and some other distro on the secondary partion.

How would I do this, every install of RH has used the full 40 gig drive. There is a bunch of directories created.

Second how do I get it to understand the partitions in Grub? I assume I would just modify the RH grub to include say Mandy command lines as an option?

I primarily want to do this so I can experiment with different distro's like slack, mandy, debian etc. Yet maintain a useable system.

Any suggestions other than the flamed ones are as always greatly appreciated.

Ras

How would I do this, every install of RH has used the full 40 gig drive. There is a bunch of directories created

take a look at information on parted for creating space on your drive(s).

Second how do I get it to understand the partitions in Grub? I assume I would just modify the RH grub to include say Mandy command lines as an option?

First I believe you need to have grub installed in the newly installed distro. If i remember correctly. But essentially your would just create an entry similar to your rh entry but just with the route to the root partition.

Someone here is bound to have such a set up and they should post their grub setup for you as an example.

[Schotty]

Well, actually you can do it this way :

VMWare. You can pick one, get it installed, and make that one the host. Then from within VMWare, you can make the other a guest. Like using MDK to host Redhat. I do this for windows at work. IT makes doing M$ Access nice and easy, but I can install any distro or OS for that matter as a guest from within Linux or NT (et al). Makes it wasy if you are testing software out. The one thing you may want to watch out for by going this route, is that you are running 2 OSes at once, you will have a bit of a slowdown on weaker systems. My works' P2-266 runs okay with RedHat 7.3 host and Win98 as the guest.

[Rastar]

[quote author=Schotty link=board=2;threadid=5169;start=0#51068 date=1033447045]
Well, actually you can do it this way :

VMWare. You can pick one, get it installed, and make that one the host. Then from within VMWare, you can make the other a guest. Like using MDK to host Redhat. I do this for windows at work. IT makes doing M$ Access nice and easy, but I can install any distro or OS for that matter as a guest from within Linux or NT (et al). Makes it wasy if you are testing software out. The one thing you may want to watch out for by going this route, is that you are running 2 OSes at once, you will have a bit of a slowdown on weaker systems. My works' P2-266 runs okay with RedHat 7.3 host and Win98 as the guest.
[/quote]

Thanks Schotty. VMWare sounds interesting will have to look for it. I have an Athalon 900 with 396megs ram on a MSI motherboard, sounds like I should see very little slow down?

Ras

[Schotty]

You are correct to a point. The CPU will be allocated as much as Linux can handle without straining you main systems' services. Ram will be user allocated. When you setup VMWare itself (not the guest OSes) you can tell it how much to give each VM. I gave win98 like 96 or 128, and the remaining is for Linux only. Do keep in mind that running Quake or UT will be painful under VMware, but will still work.

[kornp]

I quite like the dual boot option personally, it's fairly easy to set up and doesn't suffer from slow down. I currently have win2k / slack 8.1 dual booting but two linux systems shouldn't be much different. And if your using GRUB dual booting is a snap. To add or edit your boot options you just modify the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to your liking, if you need an example, here is mine:

default 0
timeout 10

color blue/black light-blue/black

title Slackware Linux 8.1
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda6 hdd=ide-scsi hdc=ide-scsi

title Windows 2000 Professional
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

now if you were to do two linux systems you would just have to remove the win2k section and add a section similar to the slack section. You might not need the hdd=ide-scsi hdc=ide-scsi chunk, that's in there for my cd burner to work (emulating scsi for an ide drive).

Whichever method you choose, good luck and enjoy it!