Suggestion about triple/dual boot

Question

When I found Arch I quit distro hopping, but now after a few months of using Arch I realized that I miss that distro testing. I want to use Arch as my primary OS, but also want to install and test other distros just for fun. Until now everything was XP/Linux dual boot, but now I want to try Linux/Linux  boot or triple boot because I still have 10 GB XP  partition, by the way don't remember last time I logged into it, so I don't mind erasing XP. What should I do. This is my HD configuration
sda1 10GB ntfs                       primary
sda2  /boot 100 MB ext2          primary
sda5 1GB swap                       logical
sda6  /  20 GB ext3                 logical
sda7 /home 120GB ext3          logical
Should I resize sda7 and use that as my test partition or delete XP and use sda1, what is better option? My biggest worry is GRUB, I don't want anything wrong to happen. I have tons of question but it's enough for now .

Answer 1

tesjo wrote:Just another option for checking out other distros, you could try a virtual solution like virtualbox. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to do this but just thought I would bring it up.
I just thought I'd give you the main reason why testing Linux distros in a VM doesn't work for me and you can decide how much this applies to you.
The downside of using a VM for testing Linux distros is the virtual part. You don't get to test on your hardware, you test on some virtualized, simple and generally well-supported hardware. I.e. no access to hardware rendering, no access to fancy sound card features, etc. There are also issues with system features like ACPI.
When I test a distro, I usually want to see that everything - video, sound, input devices, network, wireless, ACPI, etc. work. I'm not too interested in the software per se, since you can make any distro look like whatever you want and have whatever software you like. Of course, if you are using a virtual machine, you won't be able to properly evaluate these hardware-related features.
For a while, when I went looking for a distro, I would try it out in a VM and then, if I liked it, install it on my hard drive. When I realized the VM didn't let me test things like power management and wireless connectivity, it became clear that a VM won't really let you "kick the tires" of a new distro.
Anyway, in your case I recommend repartitioning sda7, since you never know when you might need Windows and it is a pain in the ass to reinstall should you remove it.
Regards,
j