How many OSes on one physical disk?

[vodhner at cox.net]

(Was:  How to safely update open office to 2.0+?)

OK, I didn't pick up the point about an old version of Mandrake.
Now I understand the "safely" part.  That does lead to a need
for some hacking.

If you want the latest apps, and don't want a major hacking
challenge each time you want to update, then it's best to have
a fairly fresh OS and application environment.

I've learned to move on to new distros every year or two, and
keep a few on the back burner so I know what's out there.
Otherwise, Linux definitely has forced-obsolescence problems
like any other environment, because the software and
hardware continue to develop.

Since I also do some work in Windows, and share files
between Windows and Linux, I have my data neatly tucked
into separate partitions, mostly FAT32, and this means I can
replace an operating system easily without having to rebuild
my whole life.

AS A RESULT, I'd like to have lots of Linux versions in place
at the same time, for multi-booting.  This leads to a partitioning
question.

I have this nice 130-GB disk.  I would like to break it up into a
whole slew of partitions, but I gather there are definite limits.
Thus I can't have, for example, 99 different OSes on this drive
each with its own boot partition.  Right?

How far can I go in this direction?  Is there a practical way to
have partitions within partitions or something?  Something like
an ISO filesystem housed in an ordinary file?  If so can it
update its data while running?  Etc.  .  .  .  

I'm thinking that VMWare and lots of virtual profiles could be
one way to go, and that way I could keep one basic system
running all the time while I'm tinkering with the others.  But I'd
like to look into the multi-multi-boot approach too, if I could put
lots of boot partitions on one disk.

Ideas?

Thanks,

Vic

---- KevinO <kevin at kevino.org> wrote Re: How to safely update . . .

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What you don't understand is that he is running an outdated and
unsupported version of Mandrake, so there aren't any pre-made
packages for his distribution containing the latest version of OO.
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