Dual Boot Linux and Linux

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This is a demonstration of establishing a desktop system running two or more linux installations. For the example we shall install two installations of Linux Mint of different versions.

  • Version 19.2 will be installed because user wishes to have the latest softwares and gaming
  • Version 18.3 will be installed for compatibility with productivity software user requires for work

The primary installation will be the 19.2.

Create the bootable media: The easiest way to install Linux Mint is with a USB flash drive. Linux mint includes software called "USB Image Writer" that you can use to write the ISO to the flash media. You can use a program called Etcher on Windows, or refer to our guide Bootable USB flash drive utilities.

Tip: Create a bootable USB drive from the command prompt with dd. (some examples below). Find out the name of the flash drive using the 'lsblk' command. 

sudo dd if=./linuxmint-19.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync

Be advised, using dd is very slow and status=progress doesn't seem show anything.

Boot from the Linux Mint 19.2 installation flash drive and integrity check the installation media via the boot menu. If there are any errors then do not proceed to install. Wipe the flash media and attempt to copy the iso over again.

Do not allow the installer to automatically configure the drive partitioning. Manually create an extended partition using nearly the entire disk less 256MB, then create four logical partitions.

  1. Create a swap partition equal to your RAM size but no less than 4GB
  2. Create ext4 root / for the first distribution
  3. Create ext4 root / for the second distribution
  4. Create ext4 /share which will be a common place both distributions can see. Maybe you won't need this to be very big, depending on whether or not your machine is LAN connected. I will be LAN connected so my share partition does not need to be very big.

Consider the remaining space (RS) after subtracting the space you reserved for swap, /share and the 256MB, divide that by two, ( Distro = RS/2 ) to determine how much space for each of the two distributions.

Here is the schema I used for a machine with a 500GB drive:





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