Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?
Tips on running multiple distros together on my laptop?
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!!
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There are no BIOS partitions - you may be confusing the term with the BIOS partition scheme, but that doesn't matter in this context"BIOS partitions" do exist, but they are irrelevant on modern machines - they are for booting GPT disks on systems that only support MBR disks.If you need an EFI partition, the first installer will create one. As for the sizes, the recommendation in the other comment makes sense to me (one ≈60 GB partition per distro, one swap partition and one partition for your personal files that uses the remaining space on the disk).
I mean SHOULD I make an efi partition? I have no clue if I need it or if it's optional. Simple is better in my case lol. SOO just trying to put it all together so far. first create a roughly 8gb fat32 partition for swap? Then a 60gb ext4 partition for distro 1, then so on with the other two partitions and thats it? how does the storage partition work? what format should that be? and I was reading about mount points and stuff, what ought I know about those?
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?
Usually you create an entry in /etc/fstab that tells the system which partition should be mounted where. I'd do that in each distro once you have installed all of them.
But how do you know which partition should be mounted wear and Im sorta confused by that statement. Like what do you mean by "where"? Aren't they all on the same hard drive, so wouldn't they all just mount to your drive?
It's similar to how drive letters work in Windows: the partition you installed it on is C:\ and you can assign any other letter to any other partition.
On Linux, the partition you installed it on is / and you can mount other partitions in any empty directory.
I understand. Would I mount all partitions to root? also I just thought about something; what about gpt format? I know that is used for linux but where does that come in? like are ext4 and gpt the same types of things or different types of formats for different things?
You can only mount one partition at one mount point, but any empty directory on one partition can be a mount point for another partition.
GPT is a partition table and is not used for Linux specifically, but on any computer with UEFI - it defines how to find partitions on a disk, but not how they are formatted.
ext4 is a filesystem - formatting a partition with ext4 means creating data structures that tell the OS where to find files and directories in the partition.
If this is a plain computer (desktop/laptop): I'd simply turn EFI off and call it a day.
Sounds good to me. If I dont really know what it is, then maybe I dont need it enabled