Hello all, sorry for such a newbish question, as I should probably know how to properly partition a hard drive, but I really don’t know where to start. So what I’m looking to do is install a Debian distro, RHEL, and Arch. Want to go with Mint LMDE, Manjaro, and Fedora. I do not need very much storage, so I don’t think space is an issue. I have like a 500+ something GB ssd and the few things that I do need to store are in a cloud. I pretty much use my laptop for browsing, researching, maybe streaming videos, and hopefully more programming and tinkering as I learn more; that’s about all… no gaming or no data hoarding.
Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the “run alongside” option? or would I have to manually partition things out? Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros, etc.? hoping you kind folks can offer me some simple advice on how to go about this without messing up my system. It SEEMS simple enough and it might be so, but I just don’t personally know how to go about it lol. Thanks alot!!
I think the easier solution would be not to use hibernation - either shut the system down properly or use suspend-to-RAM.
If everything works, the bootloader should be whichever GRUB version comes with the distro you install first and the other distros’ installers should just add entries to boot them.
Perfect! Thanks for this info. Sounds much easier. Is there one particular bootloader you think would be BEST for multibooting different distro types? My guess would be a Debian system first probably? and do you recommend I make separate partitions for everything or just install the other distros into the same partition as the first install?
There shouldn’t be any significant difference between the GRUB versions that come with different distros, so the order in which you install the distros doesn’t really matter.
You can’t install multiple distros on one partition, so you need at least one partition per distro.
Ok cool, thanks. Does the bootloader partition get created automatically by the installer or is that something you must do manually? and should each partition for each distro have it’s own swap? or just one swap to handle all three?
