Installing a different flavor without loosing anything.

[emshains]

Hello forum!
Recently I've been having moronic problems with 9.10, more precisely, with metacity/gnome-bar, usbmuxd, a bit of nvidia driver specific problems and general apt problems, like broken packages. So, I've decided to try something a bit more easier to sustain. Since I've quit gaming on the PC, and usually all I do is browse the web, listen to music and watch movies on the pc, I think I could try either arch or gentoo. But I don't want to fiddle with the partitions.
I already have made a seperate /home partition, the root partition has around 20 gb. So, if I want to install any other linux distro, I can just tell it to install on those 20 gb of the root partition ?

And how about wireless drivers in gentoo/arch ? Do they have some kind of uncompiled packages on the install CD or do I have to get the packages myself before installing ?

[nothingspecial]

Hello forum!
Recently I've been having moronic problems with 9.10, more precisely, with metacity/gnome-bar, usbmuxd, a bit of nvidia driver specific problems and general apt problems, like broken packages. So, I've decided to try something a bit more easier to sustain. Since I've quit gaming on the PC, and usually all I do is browse the web, listen to music and watch movies on the pc, I think I could try either arch or gentoo. But I don't want to fiddle with the partitions.
I already have made a seperate /home partition, the root partition has around 20 gb. So, if I want to install any other linux distro, I can just tell it to install on those 20 gb of the root partition ?

And how about wireless drivers in gentoo/arch ? Do they have some kind of uncompiled packages on the install CD or do I have to get the packages myself before installing ?

Gentoo, by definition and Arch (to a certain extent) will be more difficult to maintain.

I have had relative success with a seperate home ubuntu/arch but it doesn`t work perfectly.

Seperate /home is more useful for distributions you have to reinstall regularly - such as Ubuntu. I claim no knowledge of gentoo but for Arch, it isn`t really necessary.

[perspectoff]

It's losing, not loosing.

I have a noose for such grammatically errirs.

[nothingspecial]

It's losing, not loosing.

I have a noose for such grammatically errirs.

The grammer is fine. It`s just spelled wrong ;)

[emshains]

I must apologize for my grammar, I am a bit tired now and I was tired when I was writing the first post. But anyway, in gentoo/arch, it would be easier to use non-distro packages, wouldn't it ? Or at least I wouldn't have the need to use non-distro packages. One other reason I want to have a different distribution is that I want sync my iPhone, and I've gotten it to be "found" by gtkpod, but still no success in syncing it. If anyone has any interest in that, I was following this this (http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/10/iphone-syncing-on-linux-part-2/).