Bootin 4 OS'es?

[Mike McMullin]

On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 17:29 +0800, SYNass IT Ubuntu / Linux wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 01:25 -0400, Mike McMullin wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 10:49 -0400, stan wrote:
> > > I'd like to set my laptop up to boot 4 different OS'es. Those would be
> > > Ubuntu, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and XP. Can anyone suggest a way to do this?
> > 
> >   Install XP First, or if it is installed, figure out how much room you
> > want to shrink it by, and remember that figure.  During the partitioning
> > (You can shrink your XP install here, after you've defragged XP using
> > Windows), set up your /Swap as a primary partition, then use the rest as
> > an extended partition and give some thought to whether you are going to
> > use one /home partition for the three remaining OS' or their
> > separate /home partitions, or whether you want even separate /home
> > partitions.  Also do some thinking about which one of the OS' will
> > handle the boot process.  My main system has 5 OS' on it, and managing
> > Grub has become an issue.  Those OS' which upgrade the Kernel and
> > initrd, but use symlinks make this easier, those that do not require
> > editing of /boot/grub/menu.lst to point to the correct kernel/initrd
> > images.
> 
> Hi Mike
> Your suggestion to setup /SWAP as a primary partition interests me !
> Can you explain me why ?

  On my system, mentioned above, /swap is the first partition on the
second hard drive, that's due to access time, and it's all arguable.
Modern systems support enough RAM that actually using swap is rare in my
experience.  The real question would be data access times, and the first
partition is actually on the outside of the disk and works it's way
inward, so you have a bigger circumference on the outer tracks than on
the inner tracks.  Part of my logic is flawed, but this is the way I
would do it.

> After using OS/2 for more than 13 years and my very first Ubuntu 7.10
> since October 2007 I am preparing an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation from 
> scratch !

  I just did a change from Mythbuntu to Ubuntu 8.04.

> My thoughts were somewhat similar to yours above:
> prim for WinXPP and the (swap, root and home) in extended.
> 
> I wanted to install OS/2 again / too but I am not sure anymore yet 
> but I do need to get my OS/2 data migrated !!! ;-)
> 
> TIA for your efforts and explanation of SWAP in primary.
> Cheers, svobi

  Might I suggest that you do a data burn/backup of your OS/2 data and
then use virtualbox to host OS/2 inside of Ubuntu?  I have virtualbox on
my laptop and have tinkered with it a bit, actually installing
Mandriva2008 and running it for a bit before trashing it.  (I made the
space for it too small for it to be useful.)