Location of Swap Partition when Dual booting with LL4

[HereNow]

Hi, I use a physical hard drive for my main machine and LL is currently my everyday distribution.  My current scheme has an extended partition, with a shared swap partition "at the front", 3 distros, and a sharing partition at the back. But this scheme was a little too ambitious, so I'm going down to only two distros.

My question is, now that LL is now going to a swap file, instead of a swap partition, does my swap partition for a secondary distro need to be my first partition or can my new scheme be LL4/swap partition/secondary distro? In other words, does my secondary distro care where physically the swap partition is?

[kpanic]

Hi,

In LL 4.0, you may use swap partition instead of swap file. Personally I find swap partition scheme easier to maintain.
I don't know how many physical HD you have but I assume here that you have one physical hard drive and you
want to have two separate OS's in it?

First of all, I suggest strongly to have a GPT partition scheme instead of "MBR only". It makes more sense and easier
to maintain since you don't need to worry about "extended partitions" and so on. Just create as many partitions as
you need and they are basically all the same, except that you may define the partition type more accurately using GPT
than MBR only.

Secondly, it is a good practice to have that swap partition the last partition in the disk since you propably won't need swap
at all with LL and thus the physical HD does not need to read/write that area, making the system a bit faster as such.

If you specify more of your disk(s) layout, I may be able to give more accurate opinion

[JesusLinux]

Hi
I'm also interested in Dual booting.

Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on how to set it up for 2 linux distros.

Thank you

[kpanic]

Hi,

Usually Linux distros are smart. If they see one installation of Linux already on the computer,
they are (usually) able to modify the bootloader automatically for user to select between the two.
Did you try that already?

[JesusLinux]

Hello
Not yet, since I'm having little time at the moment.
I intend to dual boot 2 linux distros on my old laptop with 80GB HD space.This will be my "Linux Machine" that I intend to use to learn more about Linux in general.
So I'm thinking about this layout:
20GB for distro 1
20GB for distro 22/4GB Swap partitionthe rest of the space for a /home folder that can be accessed by either distro.
I already have one distro installed, so should I use Gparted to set the partitions and then install distro 2?

[kpanic]

Hello
Not yet, since I'm having little time at the moment.
I intend to dual boot 2 linux distros on my old laptop with 80GB HD space.This will be my "Linux Machine" that I intend to use to learn more about Linux in general.
So I'm thinking about this layout:
20GB for distro 1
20GB for distro 22/4GB Swap partitionthe rest of the space for a /home folder that can be accessed by either distro.
I already have one distro installed, so should I use Gparted to set the partitions and then install distro 2?

I have no idea why you want to install 2 Linuxes in such a small HD but of course it can be done.
However, I stronly suggest installing only Linux Lite but that is just my 5 cents

OK, Let us install those two distros.
I suggest that you partition your HD using Linux Lite 4.0 USB / CD / DVD / SD or whatever
but not install it yet. Just boot from it and it will bring on a live Linux Lite which is only in RAM memory
and you can use the following methods to prepare your HD for the actual installations.

Why this? Because it forces your installations to be stable. I will explain about this more if
you want but let's partition your HD first.
So, you have booted the Lite 4.0 from USB or other external media...

You are in a RAM-only session. Please open the terminal. You will find it.
Then, these partition instructions are from my previous post but please check it out

https://dfgkh547-jsdfv8.iyhkj.tk/forums/insta...supported/

Just modify these rules for 2 distros ( create 4 partitions ) and for those 2 swap partitions, 1048576 sectors
for each of them is enough.

Feel free to ask more if you have trouble to install them

[JesusLinux]

"I have no idea why you want to install 2 Linuxes in such a small HD but of course it can be done.
However, I stronly suggest installing only Linux Lite but that is just my 5 cents "

Like I said this old laptop will be mostly for learning purposes. I don't intend to store much data in it maybe some needed programs, some music and a couple of movies.
I will use it to surf the web and to go to youtube for ex. and other common sites.
This laptop is not my primary laptop (as I have other 2) and is located in a second house.

"Just modify these rules for 2 distros ( create 4 partitions ) and for those 2 swap partitions, 1048576 sectors
for each of them is enough."

I've been reading that only one swap partition is needed and can be shared by the 2 distros.
I already have one distro fully installed across the HD with swap partition.
Can't I use Gparted to resize the current distro partition and create other partitions?

[kpanic]

"I have no idea why you want to install 2 Linuxes in such a small HD but of course it can be done.
However, I stronly suggest installing only Linux Lite but that is just my 5 cents "

Like I said this old laptop will be mostly for learning purposes. I don't intend to store much data in it maybe some needed programs, some music and a couple of movies.
I will use it to surf the web and to go to youtube for ex. and other common sites.
This laptop is not my primary laptop (as I have other 2) and is located in a second house.

"Just modify these rules for 2 distros ( create 4 partitions ) and for those 2 swap partitions, 1048576 sectors
for each of them is enough."

I've been reading that only one swap partition is needed and can be shared by the 2 distros.
I already have one distro fully installed across the HD with swap partition.
Can't I use Gparted to resize the current distro partition and create other partitions?

I don't recommend having the old distro there and since it will be only for learning purposes, I suggest that you
save your data from the old distro and do two fresh installations - about 39 + 0.5 Gb for both of them.
So, your disk should have 2 big root partitions, both about 39 Gb and two swap partitions both about 0.5 Gb.

Just create them before actual installations. Some distros may put a trojan horse called "btrfs" on your disk
without even asking. Btrfs is not ready yet IMHO, I would not install anything to alpha/beta state -filesystem.

[kpanic]

Please do not share one swap with two OS's

You have enough room for 1Gb swap for each