Well as you all know I'm no Linux expert by any means, but I do like trying different distros and configurations. I'm fairly "hardware poor" so I have only 1 system to install and try software.
I'm installing Linux on an old PII 550 with 512 ram. It has a cdrw\dvd combo drive and 2 hard drives, a 20gb and a 10gb. I had successfully installed Xandros 3.01 and Suse 9.3 Pro on it and had both running pretty well.
Now I have Lindspire 5.0 that I wanted to try and running it live just wasn't cutting it. So I decided to try installing it. Now Lindros doesn't have any built in functionality for partitioning, so the drive has to be prepared prior to installing it or you just give it the whole drive.
Since I have 2 drives and 3 OS's, I had to partition. I used Fdisk to completely wipe all partitions and recreate them by splitting the 20 gb in half.
I installed Lindspire first onto the 2nd partition. All went fine there. Next I installed Suse 10 onto the first partition of the same drive. Now Suse does have partitioning abilities so I chose to use the "Expert Custom" options.
Now, these can be somewhat intimidating and confusing so you realy have to be careful so as not to lose what you have already done. During partitioning you also have to set a mount point partition and chooses whether to designate a swap partition or not. I decided to install both Suse and Xandros without a swap partition. The Suse install completed and I rebooted everything to test. I found that both Distros were useable and worked fine.
I then installed the Xandros. I installed this last simply because I prefer it's boot loader to the others. Again I had to point the install to the correct partition or drive in this case, and chose not to use a swap partition. The install completed flawlessly and after rebooting I found that all 3 distros are in the boot options, and all 3 are working as designed.
All of these distros had updates but I didn't update them until I had all 3 installed and was sure that they worked. I then installed all updates for all 3. everything is still working well.
In all of this I learned that as in any software installation it is imperative to pre plan what you want to do. There were several times that I had to wipe it all and start over because I didn't have the partitioning correct or due to making incorrect choices when choosing the partitions to install to.
Most importantly I have gained the experience of doing this. I realize that as always a plan is needed to accomplish a specified goal, and enough time to accomplish that goal.
I hope that this is helpful to some that may want to try the same ventures.
