Hi all, I'm thinking about creating a setup with WinXP, FreeBSD and some Linux dist on the same computer. Windows is already installed, and I have 50gb or so left over for Linux and FreeBSD. Now, I could easily just split those 50gbs into two 25gb partitions and install Linux on one and FreeBSD on the other, but I would like to complicate things somewhat, and have them sharing the same swap space to begin with. I would also like to have a shared partition, that both OSes should have complete access to. WinXP can live isolated from the others, that's not a problem. * Is it possible to have Linux and FreeBSD share the same users and /home directory? * What would be the best filesystem for a shared partition? * Can I share programs between the two OSes? I know FreeBSD can run Linux binaries in theory, but I don't know how well it works in practice..? For example it'd be nice if I could use the same Apache installation for both OSes since it can be pretty nasty to setup etc. * Is ReiserFS completely dead and unsupported by everyone these days, or does the development proceed? * Which Linux dist would probably be the best one to use if one were to share as much as possible with a FreeBSD installation? I realize this is a matter of opinions, but I'm intrested in arguments. I'm only interested in common/mainstream dists. This is because I'm a Linux n00b and wish to use a big, supported dist with as much as possible avaible in precompiled packages. I'm looking at Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian. I do not wish to use Mandriva or Redhat/Fedora for personal reasons. * Can Linux and/or FreeBSD use NTFS partitions these days? * Does anyone know anything about the quality of the drivers released for GeForce cards for Linux and/or FreeBSD? I think that's all for now. Any help, comments or discussion is highly appreciated!

FreeBSD uses some weird filesystem type which, last I checked, isn't very well supported in Linux. Which means you'll probably end up using something nasty like fat32 for a shared /home partition. Setting up a swap partition in FreeBSD might be a bit nasty too; I was going through fdisk a couple days ago and didn't see any options to flag a partition as swap, either there is some really weird way to do it or FreeBSD manages its own swap space (like Windows).

Personally, unless you have some specific reason for running Windows, Linux and FreeBSD (like, you're doing research for something silly and don't have any funding) I think it's a silly idea.

Accutually I found some manual explaining how to use the same swap partition for FreeBSD and Linux, but it's pretty old, so it's very possible FreeBSD doesn't use it anymore.

FreeBSD uses UFS or something like that by default, but unless I'm misstaken, it supports ext2/ext3, reiserfs and others as well..?

I want windows because, well, I'm a windows user. I have all my apps, games and documents in windows. I want Linux because we'll be using it pretty much in school for various things (my school seems to like OSS). The BSD part is rather silly though I suppose. I want to learn it and compare it to Linux, and for some unknown reason (possibly due to the licensing philosophies) I seem to like FreeBSD more than Linux. The reason I want to combine FreeBSD and Linux is partly for learning, and partly to avoid having 2 separate systems with basicly the same things in them.

Another, somewhat more relevant, reason I'd like both is so that I can try my software on both.

Hey,

According to that: mount_ext2fs it is possible to use ext2 file system in FreeBSD, so you could try this as shared partition.
Here: Adding Swap Space is written that one way to have swap space in FreeBSD is to have swap file, in that case you could try to use the same file as swap for both systems, or just create and remove this file when needed (create at system bootup and remove at shutdown).

I'm not an expert in FreeBSD ('coz I never used that), but this is what I would try.