Dual-booting LMDE with... LMDE

[corinoco]

PRECIS: Is there a HOWTO for dual-booting LMDE or Debian in general? ie. I want two installs on one HDD, preferably sharing /swap and /home.

Is this possible, particularly sharing /home with two installs?

I am looking a two seperate installs of LMDE, one using just the default repos, the other using Sid/Experimental.

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I've been enjoying LMDE immensely, installing and trying stuff like crazy... and I've managed to break it already.

That happened through trying to get the dual gfx cards on my laptop working. It's an Asus N10 with a dual Intel G600 / Nvidia 9300MGS. Rather neat, the Intel card gives it a 6-hour battery life, the Nvidia card plays most modern games reasonably well.

It is tricky to set up with linux though - a switch on the side changes cards, which become active on the next reboot.

As I have discovered, LMDE does not like this. Ubuntu could handle it with the jockey app; once both gfx drivers had installed once it would auto-switch in a polite fashion. LMDE is not polite; stubbornly leaving me with a black screen at login if the wrong gfx system is selected at boot.

I was trying a few tips from this site : http://n10.wikia.com/wiki/Linux_HOWTO#Graphics_Drivers

in particular the section on graphics and a boot script to change things, and I screwed something up somewhere. I am still working, but gfx are in fallback modes, and Open GL is broken. I couldn't see any major reason why the script wouldn't work, or would break things, but I am just starting out at this kind of customization. It was written for a slightly older Debian system I think, LMDE is different enough to cause distress when the script goes wrong.

Anyway, I have decided to ditch my Windows XP install, and give the whole HDD to Linux.

I am thinking of two separate installs of LMDE, sharing /swap & /home

I would like to have one install of LMDE to muck around with sid/experimental repos, and one install set to default repos as a fallback for when I inevitably break things.

I know I should learn to fix it properly myself, but having a fallback install seems the way to go.

Is this far too much faffing around? Is it worth just keeping /home seperate and reinstalling from a live cd if/when I bugger things up?

Did I just answer my own question? Install LMDE, keep /home a seperate partition, keep a good track of what I have installed and what modifications worked, and rebuild from a live cd when things go bonkers due to my over-tweaking?

It does have a certain logic to it... and if anyone is interested I'll also post how I got everything on this laptop working; the dual gfx, fingerprint reader (for not having to always type my passwords) webcam, and all the software I want - NWN, Diablo, oh, and some useful stuff like Autocad for work!

My adventures will continue...

[lauren]

Hi!
1. If you have enough space on your hard disk, I would not delete Windows - maybe you need it later on.
2. You can use one "/home" and one "swap" with several Linux distributions.
3. Dual boot with 2 equal distributions? I have multi boot with Mint 10 Gnome and Mint 9 KDE.
lauren

[sumski]

i'm currently having triple boot on my HD; Sid, Squeeze and LMDE , they all share swap partition , and the home partition , but not the same user

if you want a debian/lmde dual boot then you need : at lest two / partitions , a home partition , and i would recommend one swap partition
on the first install format the / ,/home and swap partitions and install LMDE, on the second install format just the second / partition and choose /home partition AS your /home partition WITHOUT formatting (on the second install i wouldn't make the same user as in the first - you would then have to install/use the same applications, appearance, etc. on both installs - but thats up to you - i did manage to do that with ubuntu/fedora , and it wasn't nice ) ; after booting into second install just add swap to fstab

i guess it would be confusing to use two same LMDE installs , which is which