Re: how do people play with different versions of DBSD on the same system?

[Bill Hacker <wbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Bagwill wrote:

> How are people playing with different versions of DBSD on the same system?
> Do you install them on separate disks? Separate slices? Separate 
> partitions?
> If you want to avoid having separate /etc's, /var's, and /home's, what's 
> the most elegant
> way to do it?

The most 'elegant' way is to NOT AVOID having separate ones.... They 
need to be allowed to differ!

- partition and slice your media into many (preferably equal sized) 
portions.

- install an appropriate boot manager.

- install each new entire system into a single slice, with the whole fs 
on the same slice, directly under '/'

- IOW, label only one swap, same one each time - and one '/' mountpoint, 
different one each time.

- On each install, do not touch any of the other slices, and do not let 
/etc/fstab mount them, either.

- use the BM to change 'personality'

- manually mount/umount the 'foreign' slices only if/as/when you need to 
move data between and among them - including 'cloning' an entire slice 
to another.

Far safer than sharing /home, /usr, /var /etc /<whatever> and trying to 
remember what matches <whatever>

A separate partition or HDD can be mounted as a common storage / 
applications area, but should not have any OS-related files or needed 
resources on it.

HTH,

Bill Hacker