Share Swap Partitions Over Distros?

[scalifash]

Greetings!

I've had it up to here with windows (holds hands to eye level). I want to start the move to Linux. I've got a copy of SuSE 8.1 Personal and Mandrake 8.1 Standard which were given to me about a year ago and I'd like to install them both and see what I prefer. So here's where my question comes in:

I have my primary drive which came installed by the lovely folks down at (pre-hp) compaq. And I have my secondary hard drive which is a seagate I pulled from my previous eMachine. They're both 20GB 5400RPM, almost identical.

I don't want to touch my primary drive that Windows XP Pro is on because I'm sure I'll need to boot back to it from time to time for games and such.

On my secondary drive I keep all my documents which are of critical importance to me. I'm using up about 9GB of space on that (although there's probably a gig and a half i can delete, backups from my iBook and Outlook and stuff.) I know I won't be able to modify the partitions without wiping the drive (and i'm not too keen on forking out a bunch of money for partitionmagic), which frankly I don't have a problem with because I've done it before. I'm going to move my ~9GB of documents to my parents Alienware via ethernet while I install the two linux distros.

Now here's the tricky part.

I want to give SuSE a 4GB partition and Mandrake a 4GB partition and want to use one 1GB partition for swap.

(A) Is this possible to share the swap file between the distros?
(B) How will the two systems react to eachother being on the same drive etc. Will it get confused and think one "/" is the other and force me to boot back to XP?
(C) Is there an order to installing them? I've installed both before on other people's computers but not both at the same time. The mandrake LILO seems better (and by better I mean prettier) than the default on SuSE and Mandrake's built in partitioner seems a bit better.

Oh, and my intention is to use the remaining 11GB on the drive to format it to FAT32 and stick my documents back on it when finished.

Any input and advice would be greatly appreciated! I'm looking forward to setting myself free from the windows world of bugginess and lousy security etc. Thanks!

-scalifash/Devin

[kilgoretrout]

First question - how much ram do you have and why have you chosen 1GB for the swap partition? If you have 500MB of ram or more there's no need to use the 2x ram formula for computing your swap partition size. With todays high ram configurations that formula has pretty much gone out the window. If you have 500MB of ram or more I'd limit the swap partition to no more than 500MB an I doubt that you'll ever use even a fraction of it but it's nice to have the insurance.

Next question - why use mdk 8.1? That came out over a year an a half ago which is a lifetime in linux development. It was also known to be kind of buggy IIRC. If you have broadband, download the isos for mdk 9.1 or mdk 9.2. If not, you can purchase the cds for under $10, shipping included here:

http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/linux/index.php

Now to answer the questions you posed.
(A) Yes, it's possible to share a swap partition between two or more linux distros. However, when I did an ftp install of suse8.2 it insisted on making it's own swap partition even though there was an existing one which was being used by several other linux distros I had installed. Most linux distros will detect the existence of a swap partition and automatically use an existing one rather than create a new one, suse notwithstanding.

(B) This one gets a little tricky. When you install a second linux distro, it will also install it's own boot loader by default which will overwrite the first linux boot loader. Result, you won't be able to boot your first linux distro. No linux distro will automatically create a boot entry in it's boot loader for another linux distro; they all automatically create one for an existing windows installation. Essentially, you have to hand configure a boot entry for the first linux distro by editing the second distro's lilo.conf file. There are a few tricks to doing this but it's difficult to answer in the abstract. Post back if you want more details.

(C) Given your preferences, I'd install suse first, then mandrake(which will find and use the suse swap partition) and then edit the mandrake's /etc/lilo.conf file to set up an entry for suse so you can boot either one.

[scalifash]

I (unfortunately) don't have broadband in my area so I'm stuck with dialup (and yes I do have linmodem drivers for my PCTel modem). I'll take a look at those CDs, but for now I'm just using the discs that were given to me (I know they're both a bit old but they're sitting on my bookshelf lol). I have three CDs of Mandrake 8.1 and SuSE 8.1 that came in the box, as well as the manuals etc.

Maybe what I'll do is install SuSE and then order a new Mandrake disc from that website and put it on when it arrives in the mail. I was just looking at that site and the Linux Mandrake 9.2 3 CD Set is awfully appealing (http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/linux/cart.php/ba/pdtl/product/236). I do have an LG cdrw that came in my computer but it's not an affected model and if it fries it then I'll just get a new one, they're so darned cheap now.

So now that I'm going to install just SuSE 8.1 for now can I create another blank linux partition for Mandrake when it arrives?

thanks for your help!!

-Devin

oh yeah and I forgot to mention; I have 256MB of PC2100 RAM. How big do you think I should make my swap?

[mairving]

Originally posted by kilgoretrout
First question - how much ram do you have and why have you chosen 1GB for the swap partition? If you have 500MB of ram or more there's no need to use the 2x ram formula for computing your swap partition size. With todays high ram configurations that formula has pretty much gone out the window. If you have 500MB of ram or more I'd limit the swap partition to no more than 500MB an I doubt that you'll ever use even a fraction of it but it's nice to have the insurance.

It's funny. I just installed FreeBSD on a machine with 1.5GB of RAM. The default partition size that FreeBSD recommended was 3GB. So some still use that default even if it is overkill. I wonder what it would recommend if you had 12G of RAM...a 24GB swap partition maybe?

[natebo]

save yourself some time and buy red hat fedora core 1. it is far better than mandrake. It will install far easier than anything else. But beware, your treading in a new world where nothing comes easy, people expect linux to be like windoze, and it's not. It's like riding a bull, you never know what your going to get, it might recognize your hardware and it might not. Your wasting time installing an old version of linux. Changes and upgrades happen monthly, if not daily, get used to installing linux and understanding how graoundbreaking and new this OS is. If you think it will be your main OS your probably mistaken, I float back and forth. Each one has its strenghs. WELCOME TO LINUX, I use a second machine just for linux so I can experiment with different distros.