From: adam@address.invalid   
      
   Warren Post wrote:   
   > I'd like to temporarily install and play with a few distros on my box,   
   > in addition to my current production distro. I know I shouldn't just   
   > point them all to my current /home/user, as each distro may modify   
   > config files in ~/ in ways the production distro might not like.   
      
   Correct.   
      
   > Can I then simply install a new distro to a new partition, creating new   
   > user for it? Or is there something else I should be aware of before   
   > jumping in?   
      
   That should be fine, as long as you don't mind configuring everything   
   once for each distro.  That's basically what I'm doing right now with my   
   older system.  Each distro's GRUB should find all installed distros and   
   let you choose which one to boot.  IOW when I power up, I see the GRUB   
   menu from whatever was the most recent distro I installed.   
      
   A few tips from my experience: since I'll only be running one distro at   
   a time, I've assigned the same partition as swap on all of them.  (I   
   gather this might screw up things if I used "hibernate" or "suspend",   
   though.)  It might help to have one ext4 partition for   
   system-independent data, such as documents, music, etc.  Also, I've   
   found it helpful to have all the partitions mounted under all the   
   distros.  For example, right now sda5 is the root partition for Debian,   
   so when I boot Debian sda5 is mounted as /.  For the other distros, I've   
   used each distro's own disk management tool to have sda5 mounted as   
   /mnt/sda5 or /mnt/Debian or something like that, so I can look at any of   
   the Debian files while running other distros.   
      
   Have fun!  Just be careful when each distro's installer gets to the   
   "partitioning" step.   
      
   Adam   
   --   
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