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!!

  • odium@programming.dev
    2·
    10 months ago

    The system won’t do that by itself. I would recommend letting one of your distros do it. During the installation process, when you set that bootloader partition to be the boot partition, many distros will automatically install grub if it doesn’t exist and add themselves to an existing grub config if it does exist.

    Find a distro which installs with a default grub bootloader and make that the first distro you install.

    • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      Thanks! and as far as making one bootloader your default, is that just a matter of changing the order of your boot process? and if a distro automatically installs their own bootloader, would just the first installed one take precedence by default or is there some configuring you have to do? so I maybe really just be overthinking this. Is it as simple as making roughly 3 ~60gb ext4 partitions and simply just do the regular install according to each partition? what about mounting and all that. No clue how that all works

      • odium@programming.dev
        3·
        10 months ago

        For the bootloader questions: You just have to go to your bios (spam a function key during start up, which function key depends on manufacturer) and change the boot order. The order of things which happen when you startup your machine is:

        • your bios starts up
        • your bios selects the highest priority bootloader you have (you want this to be grub)
        • you can choose which OS to open in grub, if you don’t choose, it goes with whatever is set to be default in the grub config. If you haven’t edited the grub config, I think this would either be the first installed OS or the first alphabetically
        • grub runs the startup sequence for the chosen OS

        For the other questions: You might have to manually choose what to mount where. For each distro, you will want to mount a boot partition (your grub partition), a swap if your ram is low (make all your distros share the same swap partition), and a unique home partition.

        You might also want to mount a shared files partition. These would be files you want stored locally that you can access from all the distros. Don’t mount this in the install process, instead mount it after you install from whatever file manager you use on each distro. Make a ~/shared folder and mount it to that.

        • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
          1·
          10 months ago

          now this version sounds more simple. SO create three ext4 partitions roughly 50-60gb for each distro, maybe create a swap or maybe a storage partition? I don’t understand how the storage partition would come into play, but I can just save anything important to my cloud drive anyway, so I don’t necessarily need extra on device storage. So is that really it?

          • odium@programming.dev
            2·
            10 months ago

            As for how exactly you add each distro to the grub config, refer to the distro specific grub instructions. Some user friendly distros auto detect and add themselves to grub, but some of the more customizable and bare bones distros need manual config.

          • odium@programming.dev
            2·
            10 months ago

            I edited the comment you are replying to to answer more of the questions.

            You would want the partitions you mentioned as well as a grub bootloader partition.

            • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
              1·
              10 months ago

              Oh I see now. So I don’t have much of a need for storage on my device. If I have anything important to save, I just use my cloud drive. Also I was under the impression from another poster that I don’t need to make a bootloader partition because the installer will automatically do that for me, idk what is correct? if that’s the case, then just mount the second and third distros to that first bootloader plus swap and I should be fine?

              • odium@programming.dev
                2·
                10 months ago

                You need to make sure there’s enough space for your installers to make a grub partition, but yes, if there’s enough space, they will make the partitions themselves. You just need to tell them how big you want the partitions to be.