I initially mutlibooted Linux with Windows, and then after gaining confidence, took GREAT pleasure in wiping the Windows crud from my hard disc , and giving it over entirely to Debian Linux. However, I'd now like to experiment with some of the other distros, whilst keeping Debian (rock solid), but am unclear as to how I should partition my hard disc for this. Would some kind soul please advise me on this? TIA Tony
Either partition your disk (you should have reserved some room in your disk before installing Debian) or perhaps even better is to use a virtualisation option with Xen or VMWare (others exist also). The latter has the advantage you don't have to reinstall the original distro. If you have used the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to setup partitions, you might be able to use that, but I believe you just started, so I'd advise to stick to some available howto's.
Hello, Better would be to left the Free space as it is, unprtitioned and when you install new distro use the installed partition tool to make new partions, it is simple and reliable. thanks
Apologies: I didn't provide enough information... Sorry, I should have stated that my ENTIRE hard disc is currently given over to Debian, with the partition layout being as follows... / /dev/shm /home /tmp /usr /var So I need to shrink at least one of these partitions. Would different distros share the same /tmp partition? What about the other partitions? TIA
I think you can share the /tmp partition, but not the other ones. Maybe VMware would be easier for testing: http://www.howtoforge.com/debian_sarge_vmware_server_howto