Installing Rehat 3 EE Workstation and Fedora Core 1 on same system

From: Eric Jackson (jacksone_at_seas.upenn.edu)
Date: 02/27/04 

Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 12:52:31 -0500

I have an Dell Optiplex with 40 GBs. Presently it is a dual boot Windows XP
Professional and Red Hat 9 system. While I have experience with dual
booting Windows and Linux, I have never tried to dual boot two Linux
Distrobutions.

I would like to have this configuration to try both Red Hat 3 EE Workstation
and Fedora CORE 1, so I can look into what branch I would like to follow.
To keep the test results legitimate I would not want to keep them
independent. So for example I would not want them sharing / partitions.

I am thinking I could just install one disto first and create five
partitions say hda1, hda2, hda3, hda4,a nd of course one for swap (/dev/dha5
in examples).

I would then use three of the hda* mounted in the fstab file as /boot, / and
/home the fourth I would leave alone.

Example fstab 1:

/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults
1 1
/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 defaults
1 2
/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 1
2
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0
0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu
0 0

Then I am thinking I could just install the next distrobution using the same
/boot and /home as before while mounting the previously unused partition as
/.

Example fstab 2:

/dev/hda4 / ext3 defaults
1 1
/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 defaults
1 2
/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 1
2
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0
0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu
0 0

I don't believe there is a problem using the same swap.

Your advice is welcome.

Thanks,
    Eric

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