Hello all, sorry for such a newbish question, as I should probably know how to properly partition a hard drive, but I really don’t know where to start. So what I’m looking to do is install a Debian distro, RHEL, and Arch. Want to go with Mint LMDE, Manjaro, and Fedora. I do not need very much storage, so I don’t think space is an issue. I have like a 500+ something GB ssd and the few things that I do need to store are in a cloud. I pretty much use my laptop for browsing, researching, maybe streaming videos, and hopefully more programming and tinkering as I learn more; that’s about all… no gaming or no data hoarding.

Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the “run alongside” option? or would I have to manually partition things out? Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros, etc.? hoping you kind folks can offer me some simple advice on how to go about this without messing up my system. It SEEMS simple enough and it might be so, but I just don’t personally know how to go about it lol. Thanks alot!!

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    All those distros are compatible with grub, and come with their own copies of it. You just need to install your distros, and then when you say “I want THIS ONE to manage boot”, you follow this tutorial. (It’s supposed to help you reinstalling grub after Windows, but it works fine for grub after another Linux instal).

    Or, if you want to be lazy - install last the distro that you want to manage boot, then tell it “screw the current boot, reinstall it”.

    I wouldn’t bother with a bootloader partition. The bootloader runs fine from any distro partition, and it’s small enough so you don’t need to worry about it wasting space.

    swap

    I’ve been running my system without swap whatsoever for quite some time, and it runs fine. But if you’re planning to use hibernation or similar, reserve the same amount of swap space as you have RAM; for example if you have 8GB RAM then at least 8GB swap.

    IMPORTANT: if hibernating a distro, don’t boot another distro, otherwise the hibernation data will get wiped.

    • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      Perfect! I will be disabling hibernation in Bios. Also, how exactly do you choose a default bootloader when each distro automatically installs their own? not sure on that process. Or do things like display managers matter? or is Xorg or Wayland pretty much good for all three?

      • Gurfaild@feddit.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        Hibernation is an OS feature, so you can’t disable it in the BIOS. You can either disable it in all your distros or simply not use it.

        • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
          0·
          1 year ago

          Oh ok thanks. I just coulda swore I saw a hibernation setting in BIOS. That’s another thing, would I have to create a Bios partition? this is a tad more confusing that I thought. Also determining the proper sizes of everything. What about an efi partition? or is that only associated with Windows? I have no clue

          • Gurfaild@feddit.de
            0·
            1 year ago

            There are no BIOS partitions - you may be confusing the term with the BIOS partition scheme, but that doesn’t matter in this context “BIOS partitions” do exist, but they are irrelevant on modern machines - they are for booting GPT disks on systems that only support MBR disks.

            If you need an EFI partition, the first installer will create one. As for the sizes, the recommendation in the other comment makes sense to me (one ≈60 GB partition per distro, one swap partition and one partition for your personal files that uses the remaining space on the disk).

            • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
              0·
              1 year ago

              I mean SHOULD I make an efi partition? I have no clue if I need it or if it’s optional. Simple is better in my case lol. SOO just trying to put it all together so far. first create a roughly 8gb fat32 partition for swap? Then a 60gb ext4 partition for distro 1, then so on with the other two partitions and thats it? how does the storage partition work? what format should that be? and I was reading about mount points and stuff, what ought I know about those?

              • Gurfaild@feddit.de
                0·
                1 year ago

                If the installer doesn’t automatically create an EFI partition, you can create a small FAT16 or FAT32 partition (a few hundred MB should be enough).

                The swap partition is just a swap partition - that is the partition type you select in your partitioning tool.

                The storage partition can be any format you want. If you don’t need to access it from Windows, just use ext4.

                Mount points are similar to drive letters, but more flexible. You can read these Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

                • Macaroni9538@lemmy.mlOP
                  0·
                  1 year ago

                  Thanks again. So did you mention it’s not really necessary to install an efi partition? Idk if I need it or not? or is it just better safe than sorry, sorta like a swap?

                  • Gurfaild@feddit.de
                    0·
                    1 year ago

                    If you install your first distro without creating any partitions manually, the installer will probably create an EFI partition. Maybe it wouldn’t need to create one on your specific system, but it will probably do it anyway.