🚀 go-pugleaf

I did exactly the same thing , but with the Suse and Slackware
distributions (SAME lib versions), which are much more similar. It works,
but with some extra work. I did it like this:

/dev/hda2	:root AND /usr dirs for Slackware
/dev/hda3	:swap for both distributions
/dev/hda5	:root AND /usr dirs for Suse (RH your case)
/dev/hda6	:/home shared by both distributions
/dev/hda7	:/usr/local for both distributions
LILO can boot 1,2 and 5 of course.

IF you put /usr on a shared partition you're in for a really rough ride,
don't think about it.

I put /usr in the same partition as the "base" system in / because it
contains the X11 system, and I wanted to experiment with that, too.
My "base"partitions 2 and 5 (the only not-shared partitions) are 200MB.
This is tight if you go to the end with installing, it is just workable.
Now, the trick is:

1) Put only the MOST basic apps in the distribution specific partitions,
you are going to try to share the rest. You can do this installation
with the distribution specific installers.

You must verify that you not only have the same users on both sides, but
that they have the same uids and gids too. In your case you'll want to
adapt the Slackware passwd and groups files manually.

Be aware that your /tmp and /var directories are on your "not shared" 
partition, which has a limited size. You may want to link them to similar
directories on /usr/local.

2) Sharing swap and /home is easy

3) The real work is in installing the shared apps in the /usr/local
partition. Xemacs, Netscape, TeX and The Gimp are first candidates for
this.

You cannot use the distribution specific installers/package managers to
this end.
I made a separate Slackware/log/packages-like system in /var/local/log,
which keeps track of where I installed what. (advantage: you can force
things to be more Linux File System Standard.)
There is work here, some libraries are better in /usr/local, some better
in /, and you have to play around with links and startup scripts to keep
things working. Normally, you need to manually adjust the installation
scripts for to be installed applications too.

Very often it is also practical to install whole packages to /usr/local/ 
instead of / . You can end up with /usr/local/usr/man directories this
way, which you move to /usr/local/man while linking /usr/local/usr/man -> 
/usr/local/man. Etc., etc..

good luck

Armand

In article <371DADCE.8316C21F@jasonpnospam.com>,
	jason@jasonpNOSPAM.com writes:
> I'd like to have RedHat as full featured distribution to use at first,
> and also a barebone Slackware version to learn the ins and outs of it.
> Then as I gradually add only the things I really need/want on Slackware,
> and I know how it all works, I might keep that and scrap RH.
> 
> So I take it that the procedure to have two linux distributions running
> as different OSs is to just create two linux native partitions and then
> with LILO choose the appropriate partition as root, right?