Hi all,
First off, Happy New Year.
Just recently bought a Gateway/Acer 16GB laptop that comes pre-installed with Windows8 and 500GB drive. I also bought a 1TB external drive.
I need to install several Linux Distros on it, Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Fedora, SuSE, that's just for starter. This is because I have several customers that uses different distros and I need to install Oracle on them. Besides the Linux distros, I also need Oracle on Windows running :(-
Can anyone please advise if this is achievable? I've read several blogs of issues installing Windows8 and Linux'es. I am looking at re-partitioning the Windows 8 HD and create another partition there for the Linux Distros but a bit anxious whether that will break Windows 8.
Performance is not an issue at the moment. Will using the 1TB external hard drive be a better option? Can I create boot partitions for each distros on the external drive and then boot off the external drive? Does the boot partition need to be ext or they have to be FAT32?
I want to be able to explore this option first before going to using a VirtualBox on Windows8 as the last option.
Any advise/feedback will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
All these distros support LVM (logical volume manager), so it might be a good idea to use one common boot partition and put the rest into a volume group where each distribution has its own rootLV with its binaries and a shared swap space and homeLV. You can then easily share data among these distros via the common "/home" FS.
I still don't understand why a virtualization solution (like VMWare, VirtualBox, etc.) should be the "last resort" - i would consider it beforehand.
My own laptop uses Fedora15 as base OS and KVM as the virtualization solution. I never work in this directly but create and use VMs for various purposes. This way i never have to change the base system in order to run anything. I just create a (more or less) temporary VM, change this and if i am not satisfied, i scrap it. Every change to the base system can be tested in a VM with no permanent consequences.
For a virtual system i need about 2G for the rootLV (mounted on "/") and 1GB for the swap initially. If i keep the VM these values might increase, but for a first test this is usually enough. For the base system i use 10GB for the rootLV ("/" and "/usr") and 16GB for swap, additionally 10GB for the homeLV, which i share among the VMs and the VMs virtual disk files reside in their own LV. Most of my 300GB-SSD disk is unused, though.
I hope this helps.
bakunin