duel booting with 2x *nix

[Daniel Bye]

On Thu, 28 October, 2004 1:23 pm, Brian Bobowski said:
> Simon Burke wrote:
>
>> I know duel booting is really easy to setup these days, but just a
>> thought, I've never duel booted with two *nix OS's so i do not know
>> this.
>>
>> Is it possible to use a single swap partition for multiple distro's on
>> one machine?
>>
>> If so would it impair stability or stuff? And would it be possible to
>> do so with BSD and linux?
>>
>> Im just curious. All my Ix86 dekstops have atleast 160gb HDD space
>> (over 1.5Tb in total at present), so i may give it a try later on
>> tonight.
>>
>>
>>
> I don't THINK it'd work between FreeBSD and Linux, but I could be
> mistaken.

As I recall, it /is/ possible, but you have to be careful while setting up
the OSen that will share the swap, for the reasons Brian gives below.

> I'm basing this thought on the fact that every distro of Linux I've
> installed puts its different mount points on a different partition;
> FreeBSD has several partitions(not the same kind) on the same
> slice(FreeBSD's equivalent to a partition).

As long as you put the swap device on a (BSD) slice of its own, you can
instruct Linux to look at that (DOS) partition and use it as swap.  Just
don't try and make BSD use a Linux swap device that lives in a
DOS-extended partition.  That way madness lies.  To say nothing of data
loss...

<caveat>

It is a while since I tried this, and my recollection may be anything from
hazy to utterly wrong.  The usual disclaimers apply, blah blah blah!

Basically, don't try this on a machine where you have data you care about
until you've tried it on a virgin disk, or at least a disk containing data
you don't mind losing.

Backup backup backup.  Go on, make it your mantra!  ;-)

</caveat>

HTH

Dan

-- 
Daniel Bye

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