Off Topic: Sharing Swap Partitions

[Dedpoet]

Sorry fot the OT guys, but some of you regulars can probably answer this faster than anywhere else...

Can I have 2 different Linux distros on 2 different partitions share a common swap partition? I think the answer is 'yes', as I believe swap space is initialized at system boot. That makes sense to me, but I wanted to be sure. I found a HOWTO that talks about sharing swap space between Linux and Windows, and if that can work then what I want to do should certainly be possible. I'm going to start playing with Gentoo, but don't want to nuke my Redhat partition just yet, and would like to run them on the same machine. I'm using a laptop, so a second cheapo hard drive isn't an option.

Thanks,
-Dedpoet

[fryfrog]

there should be no problem with both systems using the same swap space. just be SURE that when you are setting up gentoo with the swap space that you DO choose the right partition as "swap". there is no "pretty" chooser, you are actually editing a text file with nano so be DOUBLE or TRIPLE sure... would suck to end up with a 2gb swap file that was actually your redhat partition :)

[Dedpoet]

That reminds me of a funny story. Well it's funny now that I look back on it. I refer to it as The Great Partition Overwrite of '95 (tm). I first started playing with Linux in late 1994 and started with Slackware. I had it set up so that I my Windows 95 FAT partition was mounted in Linux and I could easily move data to and from it, as I was coding a mud at the time and it was very convient...until:

cp mud_archive.tar.gz /dev/hda1

Note the lack of a trailing slash. Slackware at this stage was too dumb to realize that I didn't want to overwrite my entire Win95 installation with a 200k file. Poof - gone.

There is also The Great Hard Drive Crash of '99(tm) and as of last week, The Great Processor Overheat of 2002(tm). But those are stories for another time :D

Still bitter about that processor one...