[ILUG] 4 Operating system on laptop

[Steffen Higel]

Feroz F. Basir wrote:
> I just bought a laptop from sony - sony vaio. I want
> to install about 4 different OS - default windows XP,
> redhat 7.2, freebsd 4.5 and solaris 8. My question is
> how do I go about installing all these operating
> system? Which come first and last? Any issue I should
> aware of? 

Firstly, all of those should run perfectly well on any system. I suggest
installing Windows XP first, as its boot loader will overwrite anything
that is there already. FreeBSD's is usually very good at picking up other
Operating Systems. Redhat's should be too, but I haven't used it since
6.0. I know little about Solaris x86, beyond that a group of people in DCU
once had a very unpleasant experience with it.

In theory, there is no problem, but it does lead to the question of why
you want so many OSs on your laptop. You'll probably find yourself using
one of them 99% of the time, and the rest just being dead space.

> Anybody has experience installing all these OS, do you
> mind sharing some information, please? Any website
> would be great. Thank you in advance.

FreeBSD - http://www.freebsd.org/handbook
I ended up buying it I found it so useful.

Linux - http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html
and about a billion other links, check google.com

Windows XP should go on happily enough, installing its 1.5 gigs of useful
(and unremovable) applications in the process.

Solaris - http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86-laptops.html
Seems to mention Vaios in general.

Though I do think you should reconsider your choice of putting all of this
stuff on.

regards,

Steffen