partitioning for second os

[jimbaloo]

I have a 120Gb harddrive with Fedora 2 installed. When I was setting up the system I just let the installer partition for me instead of doing it myself. I am now contemplating installing slackware but I am unsure how this will affect the Fedora already there. The swap partition is relatively small and the linux partition is relatively large. My main question is how is the partition arranged? Will I be able to install another OS without necessarily wiping my original installation?
I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

[Vergil83]

it will use the swap just fine. Do you have a blank partition already there, or does fedora take up all of it?

[sxeraverx]

FC2 is probably taking up the whole thing. For resizing (and moving?) partitions, a good program to use is qtparted (http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/, a frontend for GNU parted. It should be able to work with *most* filesystems and partitioning schemes out there. Also, make sure you're not changing the partitions while your OS is active--try using something like System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/) to boot your system up. SRCD should have qtparted on it.

[rong]

I have a 120Gb harddrive with Fedora 2 installed. When I was setting up the system I just let the installer partition for me instead of doing it myself. I am now contemplating installing slackware but I am unsure how this will affect the Fedora already there. The swap partition is relatively small and the linux partition is relatively large. My main question is how is the partition arranged? Will I be able to install another OS without necessarily wiping my original installation?
I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

No risk, no gain

Slackware has all the tools you'll need but you'll have to 'roll up those sleeves'. One thing to be aware of though if you use Slack is that it uses the LILO bootloader so be sure you know about LILO behavior first.

My suggestion: if learning is your primary goal, go for it. If on the other hand it's important to you to have a system that HAS to be up and running to 'survive' on, either leave as is or select a distro that is more 'user friendly'.

[jimbaloo]

Thanks for the advice guys. I think I will try to resize the fedora partition with QtParted and if I mess that up then I'll just reinstall, and this time set the partition to a more reasonable size.
One question though, if I already have Grub installed will I be able to boot Slackware from that?

[puntmuts]

Yes you can configure grub to boot Slack as well. Don't install/configure lilo during Slack install. I believe Slack comes with grub as well, but it is not the default bootmanager. Could be grub is in /extra .

I prefer a seperate /home partition for my personal data if you are going to repartition . You can share swap partitions between different distros is my experience, however I did not ever use FC.

[jimbaloo]

Just a quick update on how things went for any interested parties. Instead of QtParted I just used Parted. Screwed up the install of Slackware. I think I let it install the kernel on the disc over the kernel that I already had installed for fedora. I left the bootloader as grub, but as the kernel was all screwed up I couldn't boot, and couldn't configure the bootloader.
And now that I have reinstalled, and updated, fedora it just does not seem to be as good an install as the last one.
On the plus side, I have managed to get at least one distro back up and running. I'll probably try to install slackware when I get home from work. Maybe this time I can do it without managing to kill any defenseless operating systems in the process