A few questions about having more than one OS.

[Falcon2004]

hi

I've just had to compltely re format my hard drive (linux and Windoze) and am now in the processing of starting again so to speak. This time, I want to do things properly so instead of rushing in headfirst like usual I thought I would seek some advice. Any answers to the questions below would be appreciated.

1. If I install two distros of Linux (College Linux and Gentoo) will they be able to share a Swap-Space? And if so, does the swap space then need to be 4 time the size of my ram?

2. Can I actualy install Windoze XP along with two other Operating systems wihtou sending a boot manger mad?

3. Grub or Lilo?

Oh, and the age old question, anyone know where i can get drivers that give a dcent level of 3D acceleration support to my ATI Radeon 9500 Pro?

Falcon

[directhex]

1) Yes, and no (I have 1gb of swap space for 512mb of ram, and never actually do any swapping)

2) You'll have to chain load it iirc - lilo or grub will allow linuxes or "something else", that "something else" should load the windows boot manager, which can list any number of nt-based oses, one msdos-based os (and technically any number of oses of any type if you know the horrible & wrong boot loader hacks)

3) lilo.

ati.com

[DaBeeeenster]

GRUB!

Why lilo DH? Grub is far easier IMHO...

[directhex]

nah, lilo's easier

lilo behaves like a linux app, understanding things like "/dev/hda". grub went "omg! i'm a linux app! quick, use totally different disk naming conventions in case anyone was starting to get the hang of things!"

nano /etc/lilo.conf, couple of simple changes here & there, lilo, sorted.

[directhex]

well truth be told, BeOS Bootman is my loader of choice, but what ya gonna do?

[DaBeeeenster]

Tart

[directhex]

whichever of grub or lilo gives me the ability bootman does to press m & get an animated mandelbrot sequence wins.

[Falcon2004]

2) You'll have to chain load it iirc - lilo or grub will allow linuxes or "something else", that "something else" should load the windows boot manager, which can list any number of nt-based oses, one msdos-based os (and technically any number of oses of any type if you know the horrible & wrong boot loader hacks)

Exuse me for looking like a n00b, but...EH? :-S

[directhex]

grub or lilo will allow you to have any number of linuxes installed. windowses are handled by the NT boot loader instead of by lilo/grub. lilo calls it by an entry in /etc/lilo.conf marked "other=/dev/hda label=WindowsXP" or similar. if you select that option when loading, the windows bootloader is called. the windows bootloader uses the file c:\boot.ini to specify which oeses it should list. if it only has one entry, it will immediately just load that one entry with no prompt.

passing the torch from one bootloader (lilo) to another (nt) is called chainloading

for reference, MS-DOS must be loaded from the first primary partition on the disk (95, 98, me). you can only have one MS-DOS os on the system.

[Falcon2004]

Ok, I THINK I understand that...lol

Thanks for all your help

*wanders off to begin the labouriously long task of Installing Gentoo*

[directhex]

i was working on the basis that if you're using gentoo there's no need for me to prettify things ;P

[Falcon2004]

lol, I pretty much jumped in feet first, didnt learn as much of the "basics" as I should have. lol