Thanks to all of you, for your helpful suggestions. As I mentioned before, I previously had / and /home on different partitions. So the first step was to backup my file system using tar, and repartition. I then installed each operating system, with kubuntu installed last so that grub2 would pick up on all of the operating systems. Using tar to recover my original file system saved me the trouble of having to totally reinstall all my programs (in kubuntu at least). To set up common access to a single data patition, I followed the method described in the blog post, http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009...ess-linux.html, mentioned by oldfred. I edited the fstab file using a gui editor, and the instructions to launch the editor depended on the OS. In kubuntu I used
Code:
kdesudo kate /etc/fstab
(in ubuntu kdesudo kate needs to be replaced by gksudo gedit). In most other distros the command was
Code:
dbus-launch kwrite /etc/fstab
Now I have several operating systems running side by side. As far as installation goes, Kubuntu and Fedora were by far the friendliest. Open Suse struck me as just plain weird! Even the commands were weird! On the whole I would say this was a very good learning experience.