I have a couple of questions:

1. What tools do you use to backup? I understand /home or / and other distro root partitions can be simply copied to an external hdd with cp -Rf /home /media/exthdd for example (?). However, I am concerned that this may not work with the /boot partition and the MBR?

Also I would rather use a simple tool to backup the entire hard drive, as I do with Acronis True Image on Windows. Do you know of any open source tool for that?

(I have tried Clonezilla. It mounted the external HDD fine when I had only 2 partitions on my PC, but now that I have 7, it does not allow me to select the external HDD as image repository)

2. When I install the second (3rd, 4th) linux OS, what is the best way to make sure the MBR and /boot have the right configuration to boot all the installed OS.

The reason I am asking is that I have had a problem regarding this: I first installed Fedora 11, then when I installed CentOS 5.3 the installer re-wrote erased the /boot partition and Fedora was linked with chainloader, which did not work, of course. So I went in and modified the /boot/grub/grub.conf file. I managed to get it working after much trial and error, but all this time I had the feeling that there must be a better way to do it and maybe I should ask you.

After CentOS gave me some other problems (not related to multibooting) I decided to start again from scratch and now I have your partition scheme and only Fedora installed on with root in /dev/sda5 (ext3), /boot mounted on /dev/sda1 (ext2) and /home mounted on /dev/sda9 (xfs).

I am going to install UBUNTU. How should I do it so that it does not destroy my current grub configuration.

Thanks!

JG

@Scott, Hi and thanks for the compliment too! You are right. Some applications will conflict and cause you headaches. I had a problem a while ago where I was trying Kubuntu on a different partition and each time I booted Ubuntu instead it caused GDM to ask me every time if I wanted KDE as the default WM (or something like that). So it’s can be bit of a pain, but for backup/restore purposes it is worth it. For handling multiple OSs you could always create different user accounts for each OS. Their details (passwd,group,home-dir etc) are stored in /etc so each OS will only “know” about it’s own user accounts although you will still have access to all the accounts via sudo…

@Guillaume, many thanks for your kind words. I’m glad you like my blog.

Thanks for that link. That makes a lot of sense. As I only have 2G of RAM and a 320GB HDD using 4G for swap doesn’t seem like a big deal. I guess for servers the needs will vary dramatically but that’s a good article.

As for where to put the swap, I really can’t recall where I read it and it was quite a while ago (i.e. several years). I’m sure there will e pros and cons to putting at the end, but it is just they way I have become used to doing it. If I find time I will try and do a little research and see if there is any decent analysis of this. Thanks again.

Also linux 2.6 (and OpenBSD) allow swapping to a file. So reserving a partition of a fixed size is not needed anymore

Some more thinking about the “do not put swap partition at the beginning” rule: maybe it is because swapping is disk-intensive, therefore it is better not to f*ck up the disks heads of the beginning sectors, otherwise the disk becomes useless (sector 0 is needed for boot)??? But I’d like the actual reason if one of you have it.

Cheers

A few words about your blog.

I like it very much! I find there many interesting infos (and in relation with education, which is my field ). Also, I must admit that usually hate Unbuntu and Ubuntu fans, because it/they focus/es more on eye-candy than in making things that works. What I like very much reading you is that you’re very practical and never try “evangilizing” people to use it. You’re simply tolerent and open (minded)

OK. Now about this particular post.

About putting the swap at the end, I don’t see any reason, but I’m not an hardware expert. In the OpenBSD FAQ there is:
“(sparc/sparc64) Don’t put swap at the very beginning of your disk.”
As you can see it is only for sparc machines. Maybe this is something like that that you read?

Also, I read somewhere (OpenBSD FAQ?) that if using the rule of thumb of “swap = 2 * RAM” was OK in the 90s, it is deprecated with the recent machines. The swap is almost never used now thanks to the HUGE amount of RAM that we have now (my first machine had 32M, but I’m sure you guys had experiences with less ).

For Scott Wegner, about sharing /home. Yes that can create troubles. For instance I wanted to do it because I use Slackware on one slice and OpenBSD on another slice of my disk. I finally didn’t do it (based on the same fears as you express). Unfortunately, just as an example to confrim your fear, I managed to share the .firefox and .thunderbird dirs. I discovered, that Firefox 2 (oBSD) and Firefox 3 (Slack) are not using the same way of storing bookmarks, so I’ve a “Frankensystem” now with 90% of the config shared and 10% not shared. Idem, aMule (2.1 in OBSD and 2.3 in Slack) seems to have troubles hashing the file correctly at start and I lost some almost finished downloads (to be confirmed, however).

My 2 cents

GM

I don’t have a concrete example of this, but with all of the various programs I use on a regular basis, surely it’s a possibility in some of them (perhaps the latest version of program-a has migrated to gconf, and thus converts all settings..). Have you run into any such troubles?

Thanks!!