<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Pongo A. Pan <<a href="mailto:pongo_pan@fastmail.us">pongo_pan@fastmail.us</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> Partitioning is a big subject and the best way to learn about it is to play around with Patrick Verner's Parted Magic (FOSS from <a href="http://www.partedmagic.com" target="_blank">www.partedmagic.com</a>) on a test-bed computer. I made my current testing setup with a 1 TB and a 500 GB hard disk with all of the 1 TB disk in an extended partition, divided into several virtual partitions for data, encrypted data, compressed-old-data-I'll-likely-never-need-again, etc.. The 500 GB disk has a primary partition for swap and the rest is an extended partition with four virtual partitions for the four distros I'm currently evaluating, four fairly small /home partitions, and a comfortably large partition for /tmp which is shared among them. I find it is easier to do this before I install anything; the partitioning utilities which come with installers vary in quality and understandability; Partition Magic is easy and terrific. I made descriptive labels for each partition. This helps when modifying /etc/fstab. All of this is super easy with Parted Magic. It helps to have a printed list of your partitions when working: "parted --list > parts.list" makes a file you can print out. Then I installed the distros, being careful to assign *everything* to a mount point: e.g., when installing Ubuntu, I assigned the root directories of Sabayon, SUSE, and Mint to mount points like /sabsys, /susesys and /mintsys and the corresponding homes to mount points like /sabhome, /susehome, and /minthome. This way the roots and homes of each are available to all of the others. I share a /tmp without apparent problems. I also assign mount points to my various /data partitions on the 1TB disk. To avoid having to mess with fstab, prevent each installation from re-formatting its / partition as this changes the UUID! Distros using grub 2 find each other and co-exist happily. As it happens, I installed openSUSE last in this case and simply told it to use no boot loader at all and then ran update-grub from Ubuntu later to add it to the boot menu. I use the grub version from Ubuntu in the boot tracks of the first hard disk since right now it seems to work the best: "grub-install /dev/sda" will do it. The rest is easy: remove directories like Music, Documents and .mozilla from the /home/yourname folder and symlink them to the correspondingly named directories in your common data partition for each distro. Something like "ln -s /data/.mozilla" does it. You can use the same log-on name and UID for each distro without conflicts. Be aware though that some distros still start UIDs at 500 not 1000 (looking at you, Fedora), so watch for this. At some point you may want to change the setup. This means you will have to learn the fine points of modifying fstab in each distro and using the blkid program to get the UUIDs for partitions. There are other ways to do this, probably better and more elegant ways, but this works for me. Needless to say, this is not a computer I do anything vital on. Happily, I've perfected my utility of futility to the point that I'm not expected to do anything important anyway. </blockquote><div> Would have to understand all this..... a lot! Try...... Thanks </div></div>