Hi, if you just want to have Debian and Redhat share the Kernel they're running, this can be achived by giving the kernel a parameter on where to find the root partition.
Eg if you have Debian on hda1 and Redhat on hda2
vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 --> boots Debian
vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 --> boots Redhat
will do the trick. How to specify commandline options to the kernel
depends on your boot loader, see the LILO or GRUB docs (fairly trivial).
This way there is no need for sharing a /boot partition, although it
could be possible. I think that it complicates things and that a
work-around (eg only installing kernels from one distribution) would be
more practical.
If you want the distributions share more data -- that's impossible.
You would be limited to sharing /usr/local and /home, which of course is
no problem at all. Sharing /etc, /bin/, /sbin/ is not possible at all,
because they have to recide on the root partition for each distribution.
Sharing /usr and /var will break horrible.
So, the only things you can share are /usr/local, /home, and /tmp, which
is trivial and also most convinient.
BTW, each kernel looks for
/sbin/init
/etc/init
/bin/init
/bin/sh
in that order. If none exits, it will panic, saying that it couldn't
find any init. You can overwrite this by passwing the init= option to
the kernel at bootup.
Ciao,
Viktor
--
Viktor Rosenfeld
WWW: http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~rosenfel/
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