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!!
I think the easier solution would be not to use hibernation - either shut the system down properly or use suspend-to-RAM.
If everything works, the bootloader should be whichever GRUB version comes with the distro you install first and the other distros’ installers should just add entries to boot them.
Perfect! Thanks for this info. Sounds much easier. Is there one particular bootloader you think would be BEST for multibooting different distro types? My guess would be a Debian system first probably? and do you recommend I make separate partitions for everything or just install the other distros into the same partition as the first install?
There shouldn’t be any significant difference between the GRUB versions that come with different distros, so the order in which you install the distros doesn’t really matter.
You can’t install multiple distros on one partition, so you need at least one partition per distro.
Ok cool, thanks. Does the bootloader partition get created automatically by the installer or is that something you must do manually? and should each partition for each distro have it’s own swap? or just one swap to handle all three?
The first installer will install the bootloader automatically.
It will also create a swap partition unless you tell it not to, and all distros will use all swap partitions by default, so you don’t need more than one per disk.
If you don’t hibernate one distro and then boot another, sharing a swap partition isn’t a problem.
I appreciate the patience and helpfulness. Dont the distro installers automatically create a swap for you? if not, how large of a swap do you recommend and would that just be an empty fat32 or ext4 partition?
A swap partition doesn’t have a filesystem - it has its own partition type and doesn’t contain files. The installer might create one automatically or it might not - if it asks how large it should be, a good rule of thumb is to use the same size as your RAM.
If that turns out not to be enough, you can create a swap file on a data partition later and if it’s too large, you just wasted a few GB but usually that doesn’t matter.
Ok so then in this case, create one swap approximately the size of my RAM as I guess the first partition? and then each partition beyond would be just for the distros? i’ve scene diagrams of efi and bios partitions in the front too, what about those?
The order of the partitions shouldn’t matter - usually the EFI partition comes first if there is one at all, but as far as I know that isn’t actually required.