Clive Menzies wrote:
Sometimes different distros (as is the case with Ubuntu, afaik) will modify /boot as part of automatic upgrades, etc.On (08/04/06 19:38), Masatran (Deepak), R. wrote:Why should "/boot" be on a separate partition (rather than on the "/" partition)? I have installed Debian 3.1 with a separate "/boot" partition. I intend installing Ubuntu 5.10 . Should I share the "/boot" partition between Debian and Ubuntu?There are probably a number of reasons why but I use ext2 on /boot and ext3 on other partitions. It doesn't sount like a good idea to share your /boot partition between two installations.
/boot is kept separate for historical as well as practical reasons, which probably now border on the nearly theoretical. It allows you to specify where the kernel lies on the hdd (ie, at the start, which is useful for old bioses that don't support the full HDD), the filesystem must be absolutely reliable, and prevents hard linking.
It _might_ be neccessary to share /boot between several installations, in certain situations, but these days, I would just suggest that you buy a larger HDD. /boot is normally only a 10 or so MB partition! It could also actually increase maintanance, as while the kernel is typically placed in /boot, the kernel modules are NOT, so if you upgrade the kernel in one installation, you must make sure you don't break anythign in the other.
I would probably suggest you stick with one or the other, Ubuntu and Debian are very similar (If it's a server, I definetly recommend Debian, otherwise Ubuntu is a decent distribution - I feel that as a desktop, it takes [a little] less maintanence and less configuration).
Anyway, I'm typing this up at 00:40 in the morning and very tired, so I could be wildly missing the question, or be entirely wrong, if that's the case, I'm sure the rest of the list will let me know :)