Setting up a dedicated experimental/learning platform for Linux (and a little very rudimentary programming) on an older Dell notebook (P4M, 2GHz, 1GB RAM) into which I'll install a 160GB disc.
At the very least I want to set up a dual-boot system with Win XP and one Linux distro. However I have recent Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora distros on hand. Ideally I'd really like to set the machine up so that I can boot any of these distros from the single physical drive.
1. Is this possible?
2. Is this nuts?
3. if (1 && !2) what's the best strategy for carving up the drive?
Another option is to use additional physical drives either in the modular bay (can be selected as the boot device temporarily during POST, or made the default boot device in the BIOS setup) or in additional caddies for the main drive slot. However I'm trying to reserve the modular bay for the optical drive, and make the machine as self-contained and portable as possible, so having a bunch of loose drives hanging around is definitely less attractive.
FWIW my 20+ years of experience with PC's has been mainly as a near-daily user, often forced to be his own IT guy. Started back in DOS days when I worked for a time building PC clones and installing networks. No expert but OTOH, not afraid of a command line. Kinda like it, actually. ;-)
TIA,
solarscooter
Catch up on the latest ULNG Announcements at our 
1) Yes
2) No
3) Chainloading
Have a look at the "signature" of saikee on http://www.justlinux.com/forum/member.php?u=60730 particularly "A Grub menu booting 100+ systems","A "Howto" to install and boot 145 systems", "Adding extra Linux" and "Doing it in a lazy way"