32 or 64 bit ubuntu

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Marc Lanctot <lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>

| I have done the triple boot with Windows, 32-bit Linux, and 64-bit Linux. It
| works, but you have to be careful about the /boot partition shared by the two
| Linux installs. If you don't share the boot partition then you'll have to keep
| merging the two separate grub.conf every time a kernel update is done. If you
| do share them then you have to make sure there are no naming conflicts..

I always have (at least) a couple of separate Linux installations on
any particular machine.  That way I can install a new one without
breaking the old.

It is easy to set it up so that one system's grub can chain load the
other system's grub.  Then each system maintains its own grub menu.

This is really important if the systems differ in distro or version
because, for example, /etc things would conflict.  For what you do,
the problem would likely only be transient (when one had some updates
that the other did not).  Still, I expect that two package managers
would trip over each other.  Perhaps your experience says otherwise.

I always try to put grub on the boot record of the system's root
partition.  I will perhaps put one on the drive's master boot
partition but not necessarily.  Using a conventional MBR boot record
plus fdisk to mark the partition to boot works well.

| FYI, I shared my data partition in both Linux installs, where I mounted /home
| and other data like my mp3s, web pages, database files, and svn repos and it
| worked fine.. so there was only a few GB of wasted overlap between the two
| Linux installs.

I try to use a shared /home where I can.  But that isn't always.

I had a heck of a problem in one Fedora install where the new system
labeled (perhaps the wrong term) /home for SE Linux in a way that
made the old system (Fedora or RHL, I don't remember which) refuse to
boot (it could not mount /home).  Buried in release notes, I could
have inferred this, but it wasn't obvious to me beforehand.

Another problem is that the . files in each user's home directory may
not be appropriate for all systems.  Such a small thing, but
important.
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