Q I love VMware but I don't have enough CPU and memory on my laptop. What I want to do is have three distros on one hard disk and I'm guessing Grub will be my best option. I have an 80GB hard drive on my laptop. Since I have to use Windows 2000 for work, I already have this on the first partition. Installing, say, FC2 as a dual boot option is simple enough using Grub, so here's what I'd like to know. Since I want to install a third OS, where should I install the boot loader? Does it really matter? When installing the third OS, what do I do at the end of the install when it asks me where to install the boot loader (mbr/boot sector)? The last time I installed the third boot loader, it wiped the reference to one of the OSes so I could only dual boot. Finally, how do I get Grub to recognise the third OS?
A If you're booting three different operating systems and two of them are recent Linux distributions, both of which use Grub, it 's easy to build the appropriate boot loader configuration and install it on the MBR. You can do each of the installs and the final Linux installation will pick up the other two operating systems on the disk. It may take a little manual editing of your menu.1st file to make sure that Grub loads each kernel from the appropriate disk, but it should be as simple as copying the section of the file from one filesystem to the other. Of course, you'll only want to maintain the MBR through one of the distributions, otherwise you'll simply blow away your configuration every time Grub is reinstalled onto the inactive distribution.