Is a triple boot neccesary?

[DarrylLicke]

I'm trying to revamp my life (long story) and one of the things I need to do is upgrade my OS. Thing is I'm I guess you can say content with Win98 (and the accompanying crashes yes I know). In any case I want to learn linux as I'm a good 6 yrs behind. In researching Linux I found out about BSD and figured why not learn that too. Can these 3 separate OS's coexist on one physical disk. I'd only keep Win98 for legacy purposes (and fondness) and until I know linux well enough that i don't "need" to boot into Windows.

I hear about an open source boot manager as well as an open source partition manager in the freeware thread down in the Software forum, will these be sufficient for the task at hand?

I haven't determined which distro I'm going to use but I think its down to Mandrake and Suse.

A little background on me. Computer Science grad, former programmer (changing the former to current is a partial impetus), used to be comfortable navigating *nix but now have Windows programs that pretty much do everything for me (SSH Telnet). I'd like to consider myself a potential power user.

 

[MrChad]

Look into VMWare. It will let you play around with multiple operating systems without the need to reboot. If you're just learning, I would go that route before I tried to set up a complicated triple boot setup.

 

[SUOrangeman]

I have a 36GB Raptor and I have the following OSes installed on that drive alone:

Windows ME
Windows 2000 Pro
Windows XP Pro
Windows 2003 Server
Gentoo Linux 2004.2
FreeBSD 5.1

and I still have about 4GB I had initially set aside for Solaris x86 and BeOS.

In other words, what you want can be done.

-SUO

 

[Nothinman]

VMWare rocks.

 

[banibratadutta]

i'd not quite agree that "VMWare rocks"!! on a functionality level, yeah, it does rock... but as far as performance is concerned, it hardly rocks!! having said that, you don't need VMware for what you wanna do.

search on google for LINUX multiboot HOWTO, they'd explain you how to have Win98, Win2K, WinNT, WinXP, Linux (multiple versions of kernel / distros), FreeBSD etc. coexist on the same HDD. for the boot-manager you can use either GRUB or LILO, both do a fairly good job of booting into all of these. just remember that there are some issues/dependancies of placing the boot segment into MBR or the 1st sector of the disk, a topic that the HOWTO deals with in great depth.

HTH,
bd

 

[Nothinman]

but as far as performance is concerned, it hardly rocks!!

I use it every day at work and performance is fine. Sure you can't play games on it, but for anything else it's just fine.