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!!
If the installer doesn’t automatically create an EFI partition, you can create a small FAT16 or FAT32 partition (a few hundred MB should be enough).
The swap partition is just a swap partition - that is the partition type you select in your partitioning tool.
The storage partition can be any format you want. If you don’t need to access it from Windows, just use ext4.
Mount points are similar to drive letters, but more flexible. You can read these Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab
Thanks again. So did you mention it’s not really necessary to install an efi partition? Idk if I need it or not? or is it just better safe than sorry, sorta like a swap?
If you install your first distro without creating any partitions manually, the installer will probably create an EFI partition. Maybe it wouldn’t need to create one on your specific system, but it will probably do it anyway.
gotcha! now how would that storage partition work? like do you point each distro to that partition? is that how that works?
