Reccomendation on partitioning

[plr4ever]

Hello all

Alright, i'm going to get straight to the point. I want to put a few distros on my computer, as i have tired of using VirtualBox for everything.
My only hard drive is an 80 GB (really should have paid a little more for a bigger one) and i am trying to get the most out of it. I am running ubuntu right now with my / a 6ish GB ext3 on sda1, my /home is 60 GB xfs on sda2, and a 768 MB(sounded right to me) SWAP partition. i have about 13 GB to play around with, as i oversized my /home and i cannot shrink it...

Does anyone have a recommendation as to which directories to share b/w distros. I was planning on putting openSUSE on the free space, but want to know what other directories to make accessible to both(i.e. /etc) so all my programs can be shared, or at least their prefs. ( i know that debs and rpms aren't compatible). I would like to keep both distros as synced as possible, if possible.

Looking forward to your input!

[devils casper]

You can shrink /dev/sda2 partition to create more space. I have also a 80GB disk in my test machine and I have installed Windows XP + 6 Linux distros in it.
Lets check exact partition structure of your HD. Boot up Ubuntu and execute this in Terminal

sudo fdisk -l

Post output here.

[i92guboj]

Does anyone have a recommendation as to which directories to share b/w distros.

/tmp and /var/tmp can be shared without problems. In fact, most distros clean those on startup. I go one step above that and just symlink /tmp to /var/tmp

If you like to compile your own kernel, you can also store it under /usr/src/ and share that partition as well. You can also share the home partition, but I would use a different user for each distro, since you can have problems sharing some configs on different versions of some programs amongst different distros.

and I was planning on putting openSUSE on the free space, but want to know what other directories to make accessible to both(i.e. /etc) so all my programs can be shared, or at least their prefs. ( i know that debs and rpms aren't compatible). I would like to keep both distros as synced as possible, if possible.

Not advisable. Sharing /etc between many distros can give you serious trouble. Keep in mind that each distro's package manager will overwrite files on its own, and that include files under /etc. Anyway, it's not a big directory, and it's preferable to have a different /etc on each distro.

[plr4ever]

zach@zach-desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for zach:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000cd0e7

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         747     6000246   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            1517        9349    62918572+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            9350        9442      747022+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5            9350        9442      746991   82  Linux swap / Solaris
zach@zach-desktop:~$

If you like to compile your own kernel, you can also store it under /usr/src/ and share that partition as well. You can also share the home partition, but I would use a different user for each distro, since you can have problems sharing some configs on different versions of some programs amongst different distros.

Not advisable. Sharing /etc between many distros can give you serious trouble. Keep in mind that each distro's package manager will overwrite files on its own, and that include files under /etc. Anyway, it's not a big directory, and it's preferable to have a different /etc on each distro.

Thanks, that is what i needed to know about sharing folders!
Also, i tried recompiling my kernel, and it would not go all the way through, so I ended up messing my entire install, hence the want for different distros. i posted my problem here http://http://www.linuxforums.org/fo...ll-kernel.html
as you can see in the second to last post, it wouldn't mkinitramfs!

Is this all you would like?
Thanks again guys!