Need tip on parbreastion scheme for multiple distros

On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 17:16:56 GMT, Al C. staggered into the Black Sun and said:

There's a limit of some sort, but Linux can only address the first 63 parbreastions on an IDE disk (15 on a SCSI disk.)

Doesn't matter. Actually, I put swap in a file on on my desktop, and it doesn't seem to hurt anything or degrade performance noticably (yay for having 1G of RAM.) Then again, I've only got one distro on my desktop. Having one swap parbreastion would be most convenient for a multi-distro machine.

On the x86, you can have *one* and *only one* extended parbreastion in a parbreastion table. If you have more than one, fdisk (and FDISK) will get annoyed, and the BIOS will probably also get annoyed. The extended parbreastion can contain over 50 logical parbreastions if you're on an IDE disk, natch.

For some of the questions you asked, yeah, there are right answers, since most of them have to do with the x86 parbreastioning requirements. I'll summarize what I'd use for a multi-distro scheme:0

hda1 : Windows, if you need it. hda2 :boot (~50M, shared by all distros) hda3 : extended hda5 : swap hda6-hda56 : ,home ,usr ,whatever.

Every distro needs its own and its ownusr ifusr is separate from , and if you havevar , you probably need a separatevar for each distro too. home can be shared iff all distros installed have the same UIDs and GIDs for non-system users inetc-pbuttwd andetc-group and so forth. If you're like most people, you'll want to have all your data files inhome and makehome big enough for them, or have 1 or 2 "data dump" parbreastions mounted onextra or whatever. HTH,

0 Everybody knows that $DISTROOFCHOICE is better than any other

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