Sharing Partitions

[john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org]

> Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 12:20:24 -0500
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Sharing Partitions
> From: lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
> 
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 06:19:22PM +0000, john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > I'm about to re-arrange the partitions on my main dual boot PC. I have already shrunk the Vista NTFS partition with gparted (no problems), just need to do redo the linux side of things.
> > 
> > I intend to have two or three distros installed and would like to share as many partitions as possible. /home is a natural one to share and I figure that /opt and /usr/local should also be OK. Those are the main ones I'd like to make common to all. I was also wondering about /var (or at least /var/log). Would that be OK to share amongst the distros? I'm thinking /var may cause problems with package management? Any other possibilities?
> > 
> > Thanks, any advice would be appreciated.
> 
> I wouldn't share any of /var.  Too messy.  How do you make sense of
> anything if the logs are all mixed up?
> 
> You can share swap, you can share /home.  /usr/local you can do whatever
> you want and probably the same for /opt (although some package managers
> on some distributions will install stuff to /opt, so perhaps not).
> 
> Of course I also don't understand wanting more than one distribution
> installed.  If you want to play with something, use a chroot or a
> virtual machine.  Why reboot your primary system?

It's probably time that I learn to set up virtual machines. I don't want to just play with other distros, I want to use them equally, see what I like and dislike. I haven't bothered with virtualization before because the vista on my dual boot PC has no external disk, only the recovery partition. I wouldn't think it's possible to set up vista as a virtual machine that way and I don't want it to be my main OS with linux as the virtual OS. I may have to leave vista as a reboot option. But I suppose another big reason I haven't ventured into virtualization is that I don't know how to do it and it takes no brains to reboot to different OS's.  
 		 	   		  
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