I humble request enlightenment.

Poinzy

Hello, I just wanted to take just a moment to introduce myself, say “Hello” and to request some advice, or at least get an opinion weather or not I am going about this the right way. I will do my best to keep this as short as possible. I guess to sum it up I am sick and tired of Microsoft's bullshit. I built my first computer (sometime in 1975) when I was 12 years old from a kit called the Altair. PC's Hardware/Software have been both my life long Hobby and my Career. From 8800, 8080, 8088, Texas Sinclair, TRS-80 (Trash-80 hehehe) ect. I went on to put my first BBS on-line at 16. Amazingly enough for what it's worth, I was turned off by the whole “Internet thing” (“Hi” I'm a 12 year old girl want to chat?) and was to busy with my career to ever make a dime off the Internet. I'm sorry I am “rabbling” At any rate, I went with the flow always staying on the cutting edge both with system components and OS's. The only exception was going from DOS to OS/2 because it ran games better then DOS could, due to the 64K – 640K thing, and not going to Windows till I got feed-up with the “Latest and Greatest” hardware taking so long to get OS/2 drivers. Any way my whole career was in Windows based Implementation, Integration and Coding, as of four years ago I retired from a fortune 100 as Vice President / Sr. Software Engineer. With all the Virus's, Spyware, lack of challenge left, worst of all Microsoft Activation, that now plaques Windows, I have made the decision to put all my time, efforts, and willingness to help others into Linux. I had “Played” with Linux a few times over the decades, however due to it's lack of cutting edge hardware support and my lack of knowledge on the Linux paradigm I never played long or much with it. After downloading Linux Mint 7 like five or six day's ago and having the Live CD come right up and run on my;

Intel DX58SO (Extreme Series)

Intel Core i7-920

6 Gig Ram

Nvidea GeForce GTX-280

3 - Seagate 1TB-32meg Cache SATA HD ST310005N1A1AS

1 - Western Digital 1TB-8meg Cache SATA HD WD10EAVS

Not only come right up but simply “SCREAM” I was thoroughly impressed!!! And after playing with it for a few hours, it was more than obvious to me that Linux has matured. Moving on probably needless to say I Multi-Boot and have since the DOS days with each game desiring and needing it's own unique configuration. I boot;

1X – XP-64

2X – Vista Ultimate-64

Ever since like somewhere around Windows 1.1 (Windows for Workgroups) I have had multiple installations of windows. I simply put them into their own Pri-Partition on Disk-0 than hide the other Part from it. I have spent the last like 25 – 30 hours trying to get Linux into my current schema, with little to no success. Any way, after much thought and the decision to put my priority and time into Linux, I have decided to format, reconfigure, and reinstall all drives. While playing with the install and trying to get a little bit of understanding on how Linux works and reacts to stuff I have found that separate instance's of installations do not seem to mind sharing a single Swap part. Or a single “Home” mounting point. Is this correct? If this is across the board for different Distro's than if you would be kind enough to give me you opinion on this schema I would appreciate it.

HD-0 4 equal part. 3 Pri 1 Ext.

Part-0 Pri-250gig Vista-64

Part-1 Pri-250gig Vista-Ult

Part-2 Pri-250gig Win-7

Part-3 Ext-250gig

Logical Drives (For Linux)

LD-0 (ext3) 5gig GRUB (Unless you can recommend a better boot loader?)

LD-1 (ext3) 245gig “Home” Mount Point All (Linux Installs)

HD-1 1 Pri. 1 Ext.

Part-0 Pri-500gig (NTFS) Win Stuff

Part-1 Ext 500gig

Logical Drives (Linux “Root” Mount Points)

LD-0 (ResierFS) 125gig Linux “\” Inst-1

LD-1 (ResierFS) 125gig Linux “\” Inst-2

LD-2 (ResierFS) 125gig Linux “\” Inst-3

LD-3 (ResierFS) 125gig Linux “\” Inst-4

HD-2 1 Pri. 1 Linux Swap

Part-0 Pri. 985-gig (NTFS) Win Stuff

Part-1 SWAP 15gig (All Linux Inst)

HD-3 (I'll Figure it out as needed)

Questions;

1)Do you see any “Issues”?

2)Am I on the right track here?

3)Previously asked, will separate independent Installs\Distro's have an issue sharing “Home”

4)Providing I give each install the same first user account can they share the same folder?

5)4 is there a way to use a folder as a mount point?

6)Any recommendation?

7)Lastly; is there any imminent danger that I should be aware of, or any “MUST” read that I should know about?

In conclusion, I would like to thank you in advance for both your time and assistance. “Thank You!!” I look forward to being able to help others in the near future, and to be able to contribute to the Linux community as soon as I get up to speed...

Best Regards,

Poinzy

:P

PS (Sorry) I apologise for being so winded and for draging this out. (Some of us have communication issues)

tw3ak

WELL,

I'm an absolute newb, but I know that you can share home and
swap, I believe someone more knowledgeable about linux would be able to help you with the folder , I know that you can put linuxe's side by side on the same partition even ( I think ) I know windows and linux on the same partition even... it's one of the questions my Ubuntu live cd asked during setup.
Some of the more advanced users will put programs installed in their home directory I believe that's a mistake If you are going to use them accross multiple distros their could be some issues
I would prefer to put them in /opt

Good Luck

mikesd

I recommend the ext3 file system over the reiserfs.

I wouldn't share home directories. some distros may install things a little differently and what not. I'd give each different distro it's own home partition. BUT if you chose to share /home's make sure you automatically mount whatever partition you have /home on in both distros or you won't be able to find /home. You may be able to log in though (never tried a homeless login).

you can mount partitions cross distros. I wouldn't recommend sharing home at all, nope.

What do you mean folder as a mount point? Like a directory?

woboyle

That's not too bad a setup. Personally, I'd give the entire thing to Linux and install a virtual machine manager like VirtualBox and run all my other Windows and Linux systems in virtual machines. That's what I do - I even run Solaris x86 that way. My system:

Intel S5000XVN motherboard
2 x Intel E5450 quad-core xeon CPU's
8GB Ram (32GB max on mb)
4 x 500GB Sata drives as 1 logical volume holding /home
1 x 320GB removable sata boot drive w/ 10GB /boot, 275GB /, and 16GB swap.
4 x 1.5TB esata external drives off esata raid card.
nVidia 8800GT video w/ dual 24" high-def displays

I'm running CentOS 5.3 (same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as my main OS. Everything else is run in virtual machines. With 8 cores, I can run 3 or 4 VM's and still have plenty of horsepower and memory for everything else.

BTW, /opt is where major applications are put. Personally, for stuff I build/run locally and don't want interfering with standard applications and servers, I put in /usr/local.

That said, if you are a serious game player and you need every ounce of performance you can get for them, then your approach to install Windoze directly on the hardware makes sense. If not, then consider the virtual machine approach.