External Hard Drive Question

A

Aloha

Guest
Hi All,

This is my first post on here - I've been lurking for a few weeks now. I've just started learning about Linux (Red Hat) at uni - four weeks in - and I'm ready to set up my computer at home so that I can spend some serious time learning the ins and outs of Linux.
I'd like to run a few of the different distributions (Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mint) from an external HD.
I have a two macs (an early 2011 MBP and and late 2010 iMac) both running OSX 10.6.8.
I have a couple of questions:
1) How do I format my external HD. Should I just format it as per normal (Mac Journal)?
2) I was thinking of partitioning my drive into three (one for each distro) - is this the best approach? I have limited internal disk drive space atm so I'd prefer to boot from an external hard drive - although we are using Virtual Box in class and I'm familiar with how to use it.

Many Thanks

Aloha
 


Use SystemRescueCD and the gparted therein to partition -- three primary and a shared swap should do.

Try using distros from major families rather than just the most popular. For example, ubuntu, SolusOS and Vector would give representation to the Ubuntu, Debian and Slackware families of GNU/Linux, respectively. These, along with the RH from class will give a well-rounded experience base to your intro.

Best wishes!
 
If you don't mind spending a few bucks, perhaps you can look into buying VMware Fusion. Depending on your resources, you will be able to run your MAC OS and multiple Linux guest via VMware at the same time. I'm a fan of CentOS which is free and it's based off the RedHat source code.
 
Thank you both for the advice - esp about choosing distros from the different linux families (I learnt something new today :)). I did exactly that - I chose the most popular distros in addition to RH. I'll be researching more about this before I make my final choice.
 


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